When it comes to getting retro hardware running again, there are many approaches. On one hand, the easiest path could be to emulate the hardware on something modern, using nothing but software to bring it back to life. On the other, many prefer to restore the original hardware itself and make sure everything is exactly […]
Today we heard from [Richard James Howe] about his new CPU. This new 16-bit CPU is implemented in VHDL for an FPGA. The really cool thing about this CPU is that it eschews the typical program counter (PC) and replaces it with a linear-feedback shift register (LFSR). Apparently an LFSR can be implemented in hardware […]
Spade is an open-source hardware description language (HDL) developed at Linköping University, Sweden. Other HDLs you might have heard of include Verilog and VHDL. Hardware engineers use HDLs to define hardware which can be rendered in silicon. Hardware defined in HDLs might look like software, but actually it’s not software, it’s hardware description. This hardware […]
The last time we checked in with [Downtown Doug Brown], he had some cheap Altera USB Blaster clones that didn’t want to work under Linux. The trick at that time was to change the device’s 24 MHz clock to 12 MHz. This month, he’s found some different ones that don’t work, but now the clock […]