Re: Supercard

["Keith" <chen.evans@gmail.com>]

Michael J. Mahon wrote:
> Keith wrote:
> >>It's so easy to do, you might as well, assuming you've got room for it
> >>in the FGPA (two processor cores is likely to eat a lot of room)
> >>
> >>Matt
> >
> >
> > Based on my experience with the Xilinx Spartan XC3S1000 (Digilent
> > Spartan-3 Board) I would guess that you could just about squeeze an
> > entire AppleCrate onto one. And the communications channel could be
> > much faster than that used on an AppleCrate. Don't know if anyone would
> > be interested in that or not. You could probably clock them faster than
> > an AppleCrate too, but maybe not much faster since you would probably
> > be time domain multiplexing the SRAM to provide enough memory to the
> > CPU cores.
>
> Cool!  ;-)
>
> Of course, with both on-chip and shared memory communication possible,
> the entire networking premise of AppleCrate would be unneeded.  A much
> closer coupling should be supported--closer to SMP.
>
> It's fun to think about hi-tech approaches to lo-tech problems!  ;-)
>
> -michael
>
> Parallel computing for 8-bit Apple II's!
> Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/
>
> "The wastebasket is our most important design
> tool--and it is seriously underused."

How much of an Apple II would one need to emulate in order to get the
client-side of AppleCrate working? Assume that it would use the same
networking as your box is using, and not some new invention. It would
seem that you could leave out a lot of the logic that makes an Apple II
and Apple II. Is this correct? If it's not too bad I might try to do it
for fun.

-Keith