dailykoder 10 days ago

Cute project!

> Xilinx tech support page and a forum post explaining how to get the Xilinx ISE to run under Windows 8 or Windows 10. Unfortunately Xilinx no longer maintains this development suite, but has also considered it unnecessary to support their Spartan 6 platform in the successor software suite, Vivado…

Wasn't the Spartan 6 also supported by the open source toolchains? I just did a couple seconds of search and I could only find the yosys support, but no nextpnr. Sad. Xilinx/AMD should open that up

  • fer 10 days ago

    I haven't done it, but 7-series is theoretically supported by SymbiFlow tools[0], even though the bitstream generation still requires Xilinx's bitgen.

    [0]https://github.com/symbiflow

ozymandiax 10 days ago

My favourite computer... timing instruction placement on the drum. Juergen is actually planning to make a batch of kits later this year!

  • bewo001 9 days ago

    My late father was a maintenance technician for those things. He hated it when programmers did smart instruction placement to optimize drum timing. When the drum speed was a little off, they called him to calibrate it so their programs would run fast again.

zombot 10 days ago

That's impressive. It looks like the original LGP-30 computer should have made IBM jealous.

> Oscilloscope monitors internal activity.

Now that is downright romantic. What other computer offers entertainment like this?

  • jecel 9 days ago

    For a serial computer, an oscilloscope will easily do what a set of blinking lights will do for a parallel computer. By trading time for space it gives you a free serial to parallel conversion.

throwaway81523 8 days ago

Why FPGA instead of a software emulation that would be way more accessible?

bitwize 10 days ago

But does Mel's blackjack program run on it? And does it cheat when you toggle the right switch?