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From: Neil Franklin <neil@franklin.ch.remove>
Newsgroups: alt.ascii-art
Subject: Re: OT: Spamfighting (was: All YOUR Romantic Needs -
 Relationship101.com 9857)
Date: 20 Feb 2001 21:02:52 +0100
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ppunk@damthatspam.chello.nl (Peter Punk) writes:

> On Sun, 18 Feb 2001 05:19:06 GMT, Nate / DAC <nospam@nospam.com> provoked the
> following text:
>
> >One friend of mine is working on a whole new C64 board - he wants to try
> >to pack the entire board, plus a few enhancements, into a single chip (in
> >VHDL I think).

Cool. An FPGA C64 clone. URL?

<dreaming>
Then an Amiga clone, then at 100s of MHz, with all mods. Who cares
then any more what Commodores owner du jour does or doesn't?
</dreaming>


> Very High Density Layers?

VHDL = VHSIC Hardware Description Language
VHSIC = Very High Speed Integrated Circuit

This is a programming language used to describe the interconnections
of an chip circuit. Alternatives are Verilog, Abel, Palasm, Handel-C,
Cnets, JBits, ...

After editing one runs the file through an simulator (that was the
original purpose of VHDL and Verilog, simulator input for logic
design verification).

Today one can then either use an silicon compiler and generate an chip
layout (where the transistors go and how they are wired), or use an
FPGA compiler and load the resulting file into an FPGA chip which is
then programmed and which then becomes ones own personal chip.

FPGA = Field Programmable Gate Array

FPGAs are the "in" thing among avant garde emulator writers. Why write
some slow software that burns through an PIII-800 to run an emulator
at single C64 speed, when one can make an $5-50 chip into an 10-30
times faster C64 clone? And then directly plug in keyboard an monitor
and have 38... Basic Bytes appear full screen, seconds after power up.

And as FPGA code is code just like C code, there is already talk of
open source hardware designs.

P.S. I have just this January started an project to FPGA clone the
1970s PDP-10 mainframe: http://neil.franklin.ch/Projects/PDP-10/


> Anyway, it sounds promising...

That it is. These are interesting times we live in.


--
Neil Franklin, neil@franklin.ch.remove http://neil.franklin.ch/
Hacker, Unix Guru, El Eng FH/BSc, Sysadmin, Roleplayer, LARPer, Mystic