photos from VCF UK

[Dave McGuire]

On 6/21/10 3:46 PM, Lawrence Wilkinson wrote:
> On Mon, 2010-06-21 at 14:25 -0400, Dave McGuire wrote:
>> On 6/21/10 7:03 AM, Roger Pugh wrote:
>>> I quite fancy an IBM 360 / 30 FPGA board now i know a little about big
>>> iron!
>>
>>   Urr?  Is someone working on that?
> 
> Ah, yes.  VCF was its debut.  I haven't got a page up yet, but you can
> see Andrew's photo at:
> http://www.flickr.com/photos/carrierdetect/4718559358/
> 
> Basically, it's a 1000K gate Spartan 3 which contains the microcode
> store (2k x 55) and 8k x 9 of main memory.  Front panel switches are
> physical rotaries and pushbuttons; blinkenlights are via a VGA display
> for now.
> 
> Right now it fails the microcode startup diagnostics with a main memory
> parity error, probably due to a race condition somewhere (the
> memory /used/ to work).
> 
> Once that's sorted, the next step is to get it executing 360 code.  Then
> adding virtual peripherals to the multiplexor and selector channels.
> Then taking a 2311 DOS/360 image, and booting.  Simple!
> 
> Once I get the diagnostic stuff sorted I'll put an image or the VHDL up
> for anyone that wants to have a go at programming it into one of the
> Digilent S3 boards, or perhaps porting it to something similar.

  (/me faints)

  Thank you SO much for doing this, and releasing it!  I happen to have
a Digilent S3.  I'll dig it out and dust it off.

              -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL