I recreated the Apple Lisa computer inside an FPGA [video]

What's cool about this is that we're at the point where a committed hobbyist can pull something like this off.

I don't know what's in the FPGA, and I honestly don't know that much about FPGAs, but I imagine it's a pretty much "drag and drop" of the Lisa logic board schematic rendered in whatever FPGA language is used, while leveraging as many, stock, "off the shelf" cores as necessary.

It's telling that they externalized the UART, since they couldn't find a core to use, and weren't comfortable creating one from scratch. Otherwise it's likely a 68000 core, and a bunch of logic gates, or higher level combinatorial logic ICs (directly rendered into FPGA language, or, perhaps, they drag and dropped a, e.g. shift-register IC core).

But the point is that FPGAs are that accessible today.

Add to that the board manufacture. This is no hobbyist through hole exercise. Get the board, break out the soldering iron. No, this was built in a modern electronic assembly facility. Cheap enough to do one off boards, vs runs of 10s or 100s.

Available to the every man.

Impressive achievement for the developer, but impressive we're in a place that this is a practical thing to try and do.

I really like having usable, cycle-accurate reimplementations of classic hardware (not to mention modern hardware such as RISC-V). It's the next best thing to running the real hardware, but with minimal storage space and maintenance overhead.

Cycle-accurate software emulators are great (for example people have made drop-in "hardware" CPUs [1,2] which are actually implemented in software on a microcontroller) but FPGA-based implementations are interesting not only in that they create a very realistic and usable version of the hardware, but also because an RTL implementation shows how the logic design could be implemented in hardware.

And modern FPGAs have tons of gates, more than enough to implement an entire system from the 1980s.

[1] https://microcorelabs.com

[2] https://eaw.app/picoz80/

This is so neat! There was a list entry for a Xenix HD image, I'd love to see that in action.

wow, that brings back memories from my first encounter with Apple