Re: ZIP chip these days

[srkh28@gmail.com]

I feel a little rant coming on here.. CB can execute a free soft 6502
core at around 20MHZ and includes 256K of high speed 8ns SRAM cache.
Designing an accelerator for the II with CB would be a fun project.
Its a good reason to start to explore Verilog and VHDL. Even if you
cant knock it up yourself, the majority of the hardware design is 90%
VHDL, which means if someone else can, you can offer to simply
download it from them.

Considering how I go about designing new digital products, and whats
on the market in the way of learning and development boards for
FPGA's, VHDL and Verilog, the Apple II is perfect platform for
learning logic and developing FPGA knowledge and designs. Development
boards always have the classic simple switches, LED's, keyboard etc..
the idea of simple is so you can understand it and learn quickly. The
Apple II is one of the worlds most optimized, feature rich, generic
logic designs, extremely well documented and with a lot of software
examples available for it. From my point of view, woz invented the
perfect FPGA development platform some 35 years ahead of his time.

steve