Miscellaneous Operating Systems/Hardware

I got an old CRT tube, it's 1bit of color (amber/black) with CGA timing, so I have to adapt it with an FPGA, designing my personal VDU (video display unit). I am also going to build a box-computer which aims to mimic the first Apple Macintosh

and obviously the actual result doesn't look like at all

Very cool! What kind of computer are you building? Do you have a motherboard/processor in mind? If you want to replicate a 68K Mac, Basilisk might be what you're looking for:

I do not want to have to deal with Basilisk and macOS/Classic , the Woody Box aims only to mimic the design of the Macintosh/SE, I am going to use an fpga in where to design the VDU and my personal soft core, something that is a mash-up between R2K and m88K

the fw will be written in assembly, so It will be a toy, off course

It may be I will also interface the VDU with my 68060 board, in this case I will port XINU as ROMed OS.

ivelegacy wrote: [img]I do not want to have to deal with Basilisk and macOS/Classic , the Woody Box aims only to mimic the design of the Macintosh/SE, I am going to use an fpga in where to design the VDU and my personal soft core, something that is a mash-up between R2K and m88K

the fw will be written in assembly, so It will be a toy, off course

It may be I will also interface the VDU with my 68060 board, in this case I will port XINU as ROMed OS.

That sounds like a great plan... and a much more ambitious plan than I would have the courage to embark upon! I will watch with interest as you take this further. Good luck!

thank you =)

the Xinu port involves a ROM emulator I am building in the free time, while the SoftCore involves a TAP and a debugger interface I haven't completed yet. So in both cases it will be a long story.

For the near future I have other plans. I am waiting for an old CGA-ISA/16bit card I have bought from ebay. This way I will be able to test the CRT's electronics, then I will use my DSO to understand the CGA-timing. I still have a few (a lot) of dubs about. The CGA-ISA/16bit card can be plugged into a PC, so I cold run linux, or DOS. Just to see how pretty or ugly it goes on the CRT's screen.

This is pretty neat looking. Is there any update on the FPGA component?

I mentioned it on the IRC but there are so many things about that enclosure that to me scream "HI! I'M A 1979 COMPUTER HOBBYIST!"
I love it.

It's a '34 wagon, they just call it a woody ...

I am on the road again, but hey guys ? Don't tempt me to power its gears with a steam engine, the EAT circuit is still missing of any feedback, so ... the technology behind the electric bean is '50 (and any other atavic regress, could send it back to 1800)

@pentium
No doubts Steve Wozniak, at the beginning of Apple, did prettier woodworking. I was able to hit all nails with the hammer, without hitting (too much) my fingers. I made progress.

@Cory5412
I am still waiting for a working ISA16/CGA video adapter in order to have something already working to repair and tune the CRT electronic. It needs a lot of tune up, and I have to learn about CGA timing, then I will switch to an fpga to develop a custom VDU.

Very cool!

This is my Woody Box. Made it about 5-6 uears ago to act as a media server.

That looks good, I like it!

wow, it's very very cool

I have to complete my box. I am dealing with VGA timing because I already know its details. I have to analyze the CGA timing, unfortunately I haven't received yet a working ISA board. Two damaged boards from ebay. I have bought the third one, and I am waiting for it, crossing my fingers =)

jan-jaap wrote: That looks good, I like it!

ivelegacy wrote: wow, it's very very cool
I have to complete my box. I am dealing with VGA timing because I already know its details. I have to analyze the CGA timing, unfortunately I haven't received yet a working ISA board. Two damaged boards from ebay. I have bought the third one, and I am waiting for it, crossing my fingers =)

Thanks!
I wanted something unobtrusive that mathed the look of my old antique desk at first. But most women dont like an ugly metal box in the living room, by the tv. So thats how it ended up my medua server. Its outdated, as its just a dual core AMD 5000+ Black Edition, 2gb RAM. But it works well as a media server.

I saw that a company actually made a case like an antique radio. But it was almost $300! Knowing other companies made these as actual radios to look old, I set out to the local department store with my measurements. There they had it, on the shelf. It had a cd player and turntable. I paid $100, took it home to my basement workshop, and ripped all the new, working, parts out. From there it was just a matter of getting everything lined up right. It was a fun, 1 night project.

Legacy, your woody box is very cool! It's beyond my abilities and I look forward to pics of it working! Truly a very neat project!

Darned impressive stuff, you guys are legends to my way of thinking!

short free time, but I made a few progress: the debug processor protocol is almost completed (1), it will ( I hope ) help to develop and the the VDU, but … I am also tempted to complete the ROM emulator for the 68K board, which will speed up the uploads, providing a more comfortable development ambient.

oh, well, but I still have to do treatment to wood


(1) it has a shell
you can scan resources (2) on the remote TAP
you can read/write registers from/to the remote TAP
(2) something like …
how many devices do you have in your grid ?
how many classes per device ?
how many registers per class ?
and how many bits have these registers ?

currently the remote TAP is a server, I will implement the protocol on FPGA, and change the PHY protocol from tcp/ip to uart.
the code is almost done.

Nice ASCII cannabis leaf! The code is 68K assembly?

vishnu wrote: Nice cannabis leaf!

It does offer some insight into ivelegacy's unique writing style.

hey you two ? don't be tempted to smoke neither my woody box nor my TAP's cannabis leaf! logo untill I will complete the code !!!
( )

oh well, yesterday I had fun with -20 C on the White Mountains glacier (because my GaGa girl friend wanted to see WTF is on the top on the mountain ... glacier glacier glacier, what else ?), so my brain is still freezing, and I am writing from a smartphone, drinking grappa because staying on the glacier makes you to lose the control on your finger tips, but also they have provided a crap wifi, so let me write - au revoir -

just to fill another brick in the wall I played with SREC/S19 data format and I added a few new features with the purpose of shooting a file into the EpromEmulator interface.

Oh well, it talks uart over usb-bulk-driven , and I can't believe it is working damn fast: at ~1Mbit/sec, 2 Banks of 64Kbyte have been written in a whistle X_____X.