old terminals...

[Brad Parker]

"Vincent Slyngstad" wrote:
>From: "Ethan Dicks" 
>> Perhaps this is yet another thing better done with a microcontroller
>> and emulation software, but it's mostly a hardware project to take an
>> existing, known-compatible board from a classic product rather than to
>> roll one's own.
>
>I was thinking of something more like an FPGA demo board -- mine has 
>tons of gates, memory, PS2, VGA, the serial and parallel port are no 
>problem, etc.
>
>Then you could express the hardware of the machine in VHDL or the 
>like, and just code in the firmware, on that hardware.  A little 
>fairly standard magic to output to the VGA port and translate from 
>the PS2 keyboard, and you'd be done.
>
>If an additional terminal type is needed, it would be some ROM dumps 
>and VHDL tweaks.
>
>Hey, if it can do a PDP-8, it ought to be able to emulate a VT100 :-).

I did this last summer/fall with an XESS board. Just the basics, however,
more like a tty than anything else.  It wasn't hard in verilog - I'll put
the code up soon...

-brad