/IIsiFPGA

Stuff to put a FPGA in a Macintosh IIsi

Primary LanguageVHDLOtherNOASSERTION

A FPGA on a IIsi PDS card...

Goal

The goal of this repository is to be able to interface a modern (2023 era) FPGA with a Macintosh IIsi using its PDS (Processor Direct Slot) connector. The PDS is basically just a physical connector to the MC68030 memory bus.

So unless you're a retrocomputing enthusiast with such a machine, this is useless. If you are such an enthusiast, then maybe the ability to connect a modern LCD monitor using a digital interface to an old Macintosh might be of interest to you.

This project was 'spun off' the NuBusFPGA, a similar project for the NuBus used in several models of Macintosh of the era. NuBusFPGA itself is a spin-off of the SBusFPGA, a similar project for the SBus used in Sun's SPARCstation.

Current status

The HDMI (Highly Desirable Macintosh Interface) is working, with both video (single-hardware-res, multi-depth, windowboxed lower res) & audio working. More details are available in the readme of the NuBusFPGA repository.

There's also experimental support to expose 240 MiB of DDR3 as additional memory to the host system, but that requires a patched ROM, typically using a modern Flash-based 'ROM SIMM'. Burst reads are supported for that use case, reading 16 bytes at a time from the DDR3 using a dedicated port, giving X-1-1-1 burst timings.