FPGA Based IBM-PC-XT

This is exactly the type of content I come to HN for. Succinctly writen passion project posts like this one that actually inspire me to finish and document my own.

I started a (couple of) very similar project(s) for the VCS/2600 that I'm now motivated to take a second look at. One that used a modern 6502 equivalent, and another that was largely software based, but read and used the physical cartridges and controllers but passed the heavy lifting to software emulation.

That said, I do hope the author posts a follow-up on how the EGA graphics were implemented.

I love the hard drive sound emulation! I find that modern restorations of vintage hardware using SD cards to emulate drives are missing an important part of the nostalgic experience when they just start up completely silently.

I had to upvote right after this sentence: "I wanted to be able to play the EGA version of Monkey Island 1 on it"

The title is a bit misleading; it's running on an 8088-compatible CPU, and a 1 megabyte SRAM, with the FPGA containing the display adapter and drive controller, as well as the glue logic.

I love this, but I do prefer just using the NuXT. The NEC V20 is a great CPU, my personal favorite. It's a better 8088 that maintains compatibility while increasing performance and offered a great price to consumers at the time of its introduction.

What was the most surprising timing constraint you had to meet for the V20 bus controller? The 8088's multiclock cycles were always under specified in original datasheets and I'm curious what reality looked like.

There is 32MB of SDRAM on the FPGA board.... I wonder exactly what using 1MB of that as the system memory would have entailed instead of the separate 1MB SRAM chip that had to be soldered. Was using the extra SRAM chip just done just to do it, or is there a specific reason there that I'm not seeing/understanding...

A bit offtopic for this article , but I'm waiting for some FPGA's based "..device PC emulator?..." that can connect to my old hard drives from the mid 80s ... and boot them ....

Wow. A lot of memories unlocked instantly. My first PC in 1995 was a very old IBM PC XT.

Dupe. Posted few days ago by author: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45903083.

I would like to have a xt and at and 386 in this tiny form factor, to play Rogue on the X T and try to compile nethack on the 286 version of Xenix and the 386 version of Xenix. I know from experience it will never compile on the 8088 version of Xenix. It will wreck your OS and filesystem.

Well, we have a dos clone and FFTs I. The news... Can this run the DOS clone and do FFTs?

Looks nice, but there's no license. Can't do a thing with this.