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Re: First new vax in ...30 years? :-)



On Sat, 3 Jul 2021, Anders Magnusson wrote:

Hi,

some time ago I ended up in an architectural discussion (risc vs cisc etc...) and started to think about vax. Even though the vax is considered the "ultimate cisc" I wondered if its cleanliness and nice instruction set still could be implemented efficient enough. Well, the only way to know would be to try to implement it :-)  I had an 15-year-old demo board with a small low-end FPGA (Xilinx XC3S400), so I just had to learn Verilog and try to implement something.  And it just passed EVKAA.EXE:

<snip>

Very cool stuff.

Just a thought, if you were to implement this on the DE10-Nano board
with the MiSTer framework[0], you could add to the growing list of 'retro'
systems that has a pretty sizeable community around it.

A full MiSTer setup isn't as cheap as you're indicated the board you're
working on is (~$300 vs $30 USD), but in the MiSTer environment,
we've already got dozens of old systems in various levels of
re-implementation, from the Acorn Archimedes to the ZX81.  There is even
a 32bit Sparc implementation being worked on (not on that wiki page, but
can be found elsewhere[1]).  It boots SunOS, NetBSD, Linux, and even
NextSTEP, though that last one is still a bit buggy.

So far, the only DEC system implemented on it has been the PDP-1. VAX
would be an awesome addition to the list.

I'm not involved with the project other than it's been something I
started playing with during the COVID lockdowns last year.

--
Michael Parson
Pflugerville, TX

[0] https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Main_MiSTer/wiki
[1] https://temlib.org/pub/mister/SS/


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