[Oberon] FPGA - Display.Mod 4-bit colour

[Skulski, Wojciech]

Tomas:

> I did not see all screenshots, but is there more to it?

There is definitely more. If you look at the Linz webserver then there are lots of very useful packages which turn Oberon System V4 into a very productive software environment. All of these could be available at the expense of developing an Oberon-2 compiler. This development is supposedly not very hard, because RISC5 was intentionally designed to make the compiler development easy. It is was one of the goals of the NW/PR project.  Likewise, the Component Pascal software could be used if Component Pascal compiler was available. We stumble upon this topic about once a year.

http://www.ssw.uni-linz.ac.at/Research/Projects/OberonDownloads.html

The memory on the original FPGA board used by the NW/PR project was a bit too small to consider running Linz V4. There is now a more capable board almost available with 4 megs of fast RAM, which may be sufficient for Linz V4, though probably not sufficient for System 3. I say "almost available" because students are currently testing the hardware. We will see if it all works as planned. 

In a more distant future I may design a similar board with more RAM, but here we have to tackle the cache if we use SDRAM. Another route would be an Oberon-2 compiler for either Microblaze or Nios II, which would open the door to many commercial boards with SDRAM. These could probably run both V4 and System 3.

W.