Over the past 8 months or so, I've been working on implementing a fully-functional Lisa inside an FPGA, and I'm happy to announce that I'm just about done with the project!
I've designed a custom board that contains the FPGA and all of the Lisa connectors and interfaces that you need in order to hook it up to the outside world. I've also added some nice modernizations, like HDMI audio/video output, USB keyboard/mouse input, onboard ESProFile-based hard disk emulation, and overclocking up to about 4x the Lisa's stock clock speed. There's also facilities for onboard floppy disk emulation, and I've written some early code for the floppy emulator, but I haven't tested it and I don't want to 100% guarantee that I'll be able to get that working. You can always just plug up a Floppy Emu or real floppy drive and be fine.
I've tested the FPGA-based Lisa implementation quite extensively, and it seems like it's really rock-solid at this point. It can run every OS that's supported on the Lisa (including obscure ones like GEM), and doesn't really have any limitations compared to a real Lisa.
It's not on there yet because I want to apply all of the finishing touches first, but once everything is 100% done, it'll be open-source on GitHub like all of my other projects. I need to test the final revision of the PCBs before I get to that point though.
Speaking of the final PCBs, I'm going to be at VCF Southwest here in a few weeks, and I was thinking about ordering a decent-sized run of fully-assembled boards to sell to people at the show if there's enough interest. Keep in mind that this may not happen at all depending on when I'm able to get the order in and how long they take to make them, but I think it's worth putting out there in case there's interest. To judge demand and see if this is even a good idea in the first place, are there any people on here who are going to be at VCF Southwest and would like one?
If you want more details about the development process, head over to the LisaList2 forums where you'll find quite a few posts (I think about 100 by now) documenting the entire process from the very beginning until now. I'm also going to be doing a presentation on this project at VCF Southwest, so feel free to come to that if you're there and you're interested!
And one more thing: If you want to see it in action, here's a YouTube video giving a quick demo of the board and an explanation of its features.
I've designed a custom board that contains the FPGA and all of the Lisa connectors and interfaces that you need in order to hook it up to the outside world. I've also added some nice modernizations, like HDMI audio/video output, USB keyboard/mouse input, onboard ESProFile-based hard disk emulation, and overclocking up to about 4x the Lisa's stock clock speed. There's also facilities for onboard floppy disk emulation, and I've written some early code for the floppy emulator, but I haven't tested it and I don't want to 100% guarantee that I'll be able to get that working. You can always just plug up a Floppy Emu or real floppy drive and be fine.
I've tested the FPGA-based Lisa implementation quite extensively, and it seems like it's really rock-solid at this point. It can run every OS that's supported on the Lisa (including obscure ones like GEM), and doesn't really have any limitations compared to a real Lisa.
It's not on there yet because I want to apply all of the finishing touches first, but once everything is 100% done, it'll be open-source on GitHub like all of my other projects. I need to test the final revision of the PCBs before I get to that point though.
Speaking of the final PCBs, I'm going to be at VCF Southwest here in a few weeks, and I was thinking about ordering a decent-sized run of fully-assembled boards to sell to people at the show if there's enough interest. Keep in mind that this may not happen at all depending on when I'm able to get the order in and how long they take to make them, but I think it's worth putting out there in case there's interest. To judge demand and see if this is even a good idea in the first place, are there any people on here who are going to be at VCF Southwest and would like one?
If you want more details about the development process, head over to the LisaList2 forums where you'll find quite a few posts (I think about 100 by now) documenting the entire process from the very beginning until now. I'm also going to be doing a presentation on this project at VCF Southwest, so feel free to come to that if you're there and you're interested!
And one more thing: If you want to see it in action, here's a YouTube video giving a quick demo of the board and an explanation of its features.
