Steve Chamberlin over at Big Mess o’Wires presents the Plus Too, a working hardware replica of the Macintosh Plus and Macintosh 512Ke computers.
The original Macs contained a Motorola 68000 CPU and about half a dozen major support chips, with all of the Mac-specific behaviors and OS routines defined in a 128K toolbox ROM. Plus Too uses an FPGA to model the Mac’s IWM (floppy controller), SCC (serial ports), VIA (general purpose I/O), mouse, and keyboard hardware. The toolbox ROM data was copied from my real Mac Plus (nicknamed “Lonely”) for use with Plus Too.
The project is built on an Altera DE-1 FPGA dev board and at this time implements only the absolute minimum of hardware necessary to boot the computer. The disk is read-only, and there is no keyboard, sound, SCSI, serial ports, or real-time clock. In the next version, Steve plans to use a custom built board and a real 68000 CPU, and add the physical connectors necessary to use a real Mac Plus mouse and keyboard if desired.
For all the details on this project, check out the Plus Too build log.
That’s pretty much the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen.
I’d +1 the above comment, and am simply awestruck!
Fix the link with anchor text as “Plus Too build log”
Thanks. Got it.
Still enough for playing “mac playmate”
interesting…. there are several FPGA Amiga implementations. You could probably run one of the Mac emulators on them. ;-)