Date   : Thu, 18 Sep 2008 20:31:00 +0100
From   : michael.firth@... (michael.firth@...)
Subject: BBC Micro on an FPGA?

> -----Original Message-----
> From: 
> bbc-micro-bounces+michael.firth=bt.com@... 
> [mailto:bbc-micro-bounces+michael.firth=bt.com@...
.uk] On Behalf Of Mark McDougall
> Sent: 18 September 2008 10:41
> To: bbc-micro@...
> Subject: Re: [BBC-Micro] BBC Micro on an FPGA?
> 
> Paul J wrote:
> 
> > There was some significant progress made on pacedev:
> > http://pacedev.net/forums/showthread.php?t=23
> > I have not heard of any recent progress which is a great shame,
> 
> The BBC is functional for the most part, but there is no support for
> secondary storage as yet, so there's not a lot that can be 
> done with it
> other than type in BASIC programs.
> 
> I've taken a bit of a break from PACE development in recent 
> months, but I'm
> now back on board and in the process of cleaning up the whole 
> code-base so
> as to eliminate the multitude of "broken" projects.
> 
> One of the items on my to-do list was to add emulation of 
> various floppy
> drives via flash and/or SD card - TRS-80 & C64 at the top of 
> the list but
> certainly look at the BBC as well - most probably leveraging off the
> excellent work already done on the Apple II (Alex Freed) and 
> Vector06 projects.
> 
Have you got any more information on what hardware is needed for the 'PACE'
project, and where it is available from?

It sounds a very interesting possibility, and was something that I was idly
wondering about (if Xilinx and Altera can create usable 32 bit processors
from FPGA slices, and 8 bit 6502 clone should be easy sort of reasoning)

Your sites seem to have a lot of information about the software / firmware
side of the project, but don't have much on what hardware is needed to use
it - e.g. what format the CVBS interface would take.

As we've a lot of old Xilinx evaluation boards lying around at work, I'd
hope that there would be something I could push into service.

Have you done any investigation on creating a 'Tube' system in an FPGA? -
presumably if you can emulate one 6502 then doing two should be easy if the
FPGA resources are there.

Michael