Interesting mix...

[Alexey Toptygin]

On Tue, 3 Mar 2009, Tony Duell wrote:

>> Grr, I am so jealous! I have half a dozen transputers of various models,
>> stacks of technical manuals and even a C004 crossbar chip, but no C011
>> or C012 to interface to any of them through...
>
> In theory you can manage without one. The first Inmos transputer boards
> -- the ones used in the ITEM -- didn't make use of the link adapter chip
> chip (I was told the transputer was available before the link adapter
> chip).
>
> What they did was to map a serial chip (normal asynchronous thing) into
> the transputer's address space. Buffer that to RS232 levels to talk to
> the host system. And configure the transputer to boot from external ROM
> (not the built-in bootstrap-from-a-link). There were EPROMs on the board
> containing enough code toboot the transputer from the serial port. And
> of course you you sue the 4 links of that transputer to connect to others.

Judging by the description of the link interface and the memory interface 
in the reference literature I have, I think it would be easier to hack up 
a transputer link than a memory-mapped device (mostly because of much 
lower wire count). Some people on the internet claim to have done this in 
an FPGA, and there is source for one here:

http://www.cate.com.au/download/fpga/index.html

I would rather avoid that route, but it looks like it might be my only 
option.

 			Alexey