On Sat, 2 Oct 2004, David V. Corbin wrote:
> Thinking about the recent posts on "Emulating right down to the Iron"..and I
> had an idea, that I first thought was completely crazy, but am now thinking
> that it may be only slightly nuts....
>
> People have successfully modeled some of the processors using current
> technology such as FPGA's. What if someone used and FPGA or similar and
> produced a processor capable of running the instruction set of a specific
> machine, but was compatible at the PIN (and other HW considerations) of a
> x86. A standard motherboard (obviously with a completely vustom BIOS) and
> standard hardware could then be used.
>
> Depending on what type of HAL was implemented their might be the need for
> some custom drivers at the emulated OS level. But this would provide a
> platform that used current hardware (easy, available, cheap) without any
> additional layers....
>
> As I said, I thought I was completly wacko when the idea first came up, but
> I wanted to get the lists thoughts....
You may as well design it as a co-processor card that goes into the PC and
then takes over the bus. Sure, it's probable that it can be done the way
you describe, but the distance between "probable" and "possible" is
measured in terms of sanity.
--
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
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Received on Sun Oct 03 2004 - 15:45:13 BST