[Oberon] Digilent Spartan 3 Board

[Jack Johnson]

On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 4:10 AM, Paul Reed <paulreed at paddedcell.com> wrote:
> The simplicity of the board means that it is 'just enough' (with the
> addition of a small and simple do-it-yourself-daughterboard for the
> SD-card hard disk, mouse and wireless network module) to implement the
> Oberon system in a nice resource-constrained and understandable way.
> Porting the simplicity, rather than the system, to another board would be
> quite hard.

With all of the chatter about ports, I've been randomly Googling the
Spartan 3-like boards, and it seems you're right, there's just not
anything quite in the same category.

But, out of curiosity, is there no facility to use a standard PS/2 Y
cable to add the mouse?

> The real killer feature about the Spartan 3 board is the 1MByte
> (2x256Kx16) of extremely fast (10nS) static RAM (as in, real good
> old-fashioned SRAM, not pseudo-SRAM for example!).  I haven't found a
> board which provides sustained, completely random-access cycles anywhere
> near as fast; anything else I have seen would imply a memory interface
> which would dwarf the rest of the whole design in its complexity.  Of
> course, I'd be delighted to be proved wrong about this. :)

Is that a design problem that would eventually have to be overcome anyway?

I was looking at the older Altera boards, something like the DE0 with
no SRAM, does a design like that make it easier or harder, or would
something like the DE1 be a) more typical and b) the standard design
challenge?

-Jack