Vampire Accelerator for NeXT hardware project!

[bheron]

So I'd love to help. But unfortunately I'm a SW guy. Yes I've done Linux kernel work, but never done any HW beyond blinking LED lights. But if there's any way I can help I will.

That said here's my thoughts. MisTER is the right place to start imho. It's already a well supported platform with 680x0 systems emulated. None of them use MMU though, so whatever you do you'll be blazing a trail there.

However, Most of the NeXT system was commodity parts. NCR 5390 SCSI, commodity serial, floppy controller, etc.
With a bit of glue for linking together the 68K. A number of the other systems running on MiSTER actually implement the same SCSI/floppy/serial controllers NeXT had. So at least on the peripheral chip side of things we can reuse some of the work already been done.

One nice thing with NeXT is that it is a BSD Unix. So its not completely weird and esoteric.

So how do we start? with one of the M68K cores trying to boot a kernel image?

Yes, I was thinking about that as well.  I believe that MiSTER is the right place to start.  The main reason I feel strongly about doing this is that I feel like the old hardware is becoming so rare and, soon, outside of Previous, there will be no way of running older version of NeXTSTEP and also no use for some of the older HW which may survive.

Also, I am doing it because I want more experience doing SOC/FPGA stuff, but mainly it's my love for this system.  I believe Previous is a good place to start to reverse engineer some chips.  I may not produce perfect implementations, but the project could serve as a basis for fulfilling some dreams people have had about having an OPENSTEP laptop.  Part of the issue with doing this nowadays is that it is PITA to find a decent laptop that is totally compatible and in good shape.  Resources are dwindling and also I feel like so many people have done SOC implementations of other computers that the NeXT machine should have it's time in the sun. (no pun intended there)

So how do we start? with one of the M68K cores trying to boot a kernel image?

I am going to create a project on github for this and we can start working on getting it to boot with it.  I will post it here when done.   Let me know your github id.

GC

[bheron]

This 68080 just came out:

http://www.apollo-core.com/features.html

Is the apollo core open source?  Is there any way we could use it?  Preferably I want to keep the project COMPLETELY open so that people can look at the implementation.

[bheron]

The repo is here, for anyone who wants to join in.  All are welcome...

https://github.com/gcasa/NeXT_MiSTER

GC

[barcher174]

Personally I'm really curious what this Pi based CPU emulation could turn into:

https://github.com/captain-amygdala/pistorm

[rjbrown99]

It's buried in the Mister forum but someone did port a sparc cpu and has Nextstep running. Linking the thread as it isn't easy to find.

https://misterfpga.org/viewtopic.php?t=545

[bheron]

The repo is here, for anyone who wants to join in.  All are welcome...

https://github.com/gcasa/NeXT_MiSTER

GC

I've created a new repo https://github.com/gcasa/NeXTcube_MiSTer.  This uses the template.  It is just starting out, so don't expect anything at the moment.  I am going to look at the AtariST core to see if I can get any ideas about how to do this.  I have downloaded Quartus, so, maybe I can start taking a look at it soon.

GC

[wizard]

The repo is here, for anyone who wants to join in.  All are welcome...

https://github.com/gcasa/NeXT_MiSTER

GC

Get a 404 for tthat link

[zombie]

sadly most of the links have gone dead, which may be telling of the projects

[Nitro]

Get a 404 for tthat link

The link for the new repo works:

https://github.com/gcasa/NeXTcube_MiSTer