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Is the Alto simple enough to simulate in toto on an FPGA, microcode and all? It sounds like it would be a fascinating system to play with.
by david-given 10y ago
Is the Alto simple enough to simulate in toto on an FPGA, microcode and all?
It sounds like it would be a fascinating system to play with.
- kens 10y agoIf you want to play around with a simulated Alto, the ContrAlto simulator from the Living Computer Museum works very well. It is at http://www.livingcomputermuseum.org/Online-Systems/Press.aspx http://www.livingcomputermuseum.org/Online-Systems/Press.asp... I imagine a FPGA-based Alto would be straightforward since there's not a whole lot of hardware. The tricky part is the Alto is very tied to the hardware, so you'd also need to simulate the low-level display hardware, the disk interface, and so forth. There's no real abstraction layer. For instance, the microcode processes each word as it is read from disk, so the disk drive timing is important.
- rjsw 10y agoYes, it would easily fit in a low cost FPGA.