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Home Forums 68kMLA A browser for System 6 — #15
Post #15 by cb88
Source Forum68kMLA
CategoryDevelopment
Post DateSat, 13 Sep 2014 - 17:02
Original URLhttps://68kmla.org/bb/threads/a-browser-for-system-6.105/
Post
I'd like to see this browser happen if it it doesn't support images etc... text only. It would be nice if it could get formatting mostly right though. Forgoing any accelerator support would mean it could run on most all 68k macs.

Just about any DSP from that period would be woefully incapable versus what you could slap together in even a small modern FPGA... and most likely harder to code for since the toolchains are ancient.

An FPGA accelerator would be hard to design and write accelerators for but once you had them the ought to be pretty easy to write applications for.

If you take the Pippistrello for example it can have a Spartan LX9 - LX45 FPGA so you could have cheap or expensive boards in the $100-300 range by using a difference size FPGA. Perhaps modify that board to accept a motherboard adapter so it could work on the various buses. I think that should be possible, HDMI out, Audio out, SCSI emulator (CD, HD , Floppy, Scanner.... lots could be done there), Diimo030 clone + larger cache, Ramdisk, application specific accelerators it might acutally be best to implement these on one or more generic Microblaze processors running around 100Mhz...  you could add a vector coprocessor etc... You could put a Parallax proppeller in the FPGA and go crazy with that :D it would probably use less than half of an LX45 since a slightly size reduce version will fit in a DE0 board with 22k luts. There are also Zync FPGAs which include an ARM hard core... which could handle alot of things far faster than a softcore.

mp.ls