[Oberon] Project Oberon: What are nexts steps?

[Chris Burrows]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bernhard Treutwein [mailto:Bernhard at wildwein.de]
> Sent: Sunday, 4 May 2014 6:14 AM
> To: oberon at lists.inf.ethz.ch
> Subject: Re: [Oberon] Project Oberon: What are nexts steps?
> 
> Am 03.05.2014 10:51, schrieb Volkert:
> > what are the top issues needs to be addressed to breath more life into
> > "project oberon" to save its future development?
> in my opinion, it would be to find a new FPGA platform, 

The first step on that path is to get some hands-on experience with the
existing FPGA platform so that you can get to fully understand how it has
been designed and implemented. You will then have the knowledge that you
need to start looking for, and evaluating the suitability of, a new
platform. The more your proposed solution deviates away from the original
design the more work you will have to do. 

> But Paul's reply to my suggestions was a bit disappointing.
> 

Buy a Spartan 3 board and invest a *little bit* of your time and effort for
a practical evaluation of Project Oberon. You will then be in a better
position to appreciate Paul's responses. The effort required by you to do
this would be miniscule compared to what he and Niklaus Wirth have put in
over the past few years on this project. 

If you are planning a porting exercise, in the long run you will save both
time and money if you have an existing fully functional actual FPGA Oberon
system to work with. I consider it to be an absolute prerequisite. It will
act as both a reference point for validation and can be used as a tool to
help you do it (e.g. as a cross-compiler, disk image maker, file transfer
system etc.) 

Regards,
Chris

Chris Burrows
CFB Software
http://www.astrobe.com