[2021-01-12]
[2021-01-12]
FPGA and Emulators
Modern FPGA and hardware emulators create unprecedented opportunities for prototyping new hardware. However, one useful and somewhat unintended side-effect of the growing compute capabilities is the ability to emulate a wide range of legacy hardware. For example, project Mister implements a number of legacy systems on the Altera FPGA (follow the link on the left), and DOSBox is a popular software emulator for the legacy DOS environment running on an i386.
My earlier FPGA work was based on Altera Cyclone II and Xilinx Elbert V2 FPGA. Both are quite capable systems, more than adequate for emulating RFC protocol devices I was interested in, and more. However, since the transition to Altera Cyclone V (Terasic de10-nano), a variety of legacy processors can be emulated "out of the box" using the Mister project software.
This blows a new life into legacy software such as my text editor with pseudo-graphical capability. The program was coded solely in x86 Assembly, designed to run on bare-bones DOS systems. Follow the link at the bottom for an older article with a description of the project, source files, and instructions on compiling the executable.
Legacy software such as Turbo Assembler can be obtained from www.WinWorldPC.com.