6510 CPU replacement and enhancement
I recently came across an Apple II accelerator on eBay that looked really interesting. It's called the Zip Chip. What's cool about it is that it drops right into the Apple II's 65c02 CPU socket, then it uses some glue logic to add a CPU cache, allowing it to better take advantage of it's 4 or 8 MHz speed options.
I think a project like this should be doable on the Commodore 8bit machines. Plus, you'd end up having better than TurboMaster speeds and still having your cartridge slot free!
Imagine replacing the 6510 with an FPGA loaded with a 6510 CPU emulator core. Then add in multiple clock options and a transparent cache. Now stick it on a carrier board that drops into the existing CPU socket (think SwinSID).
Check out the Zip Chip at Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II_accelerators#Zip_Chip_.E2.80.93_Zip_Technologies
FPGA cores already exist. See:
http://www.6502.org/homebuilt/
Sounds cool... added to my favorites for further investigation!
ReplyDeleteI don't know a lot about FPGA's but from a little research it seems like the Xilinx XC2S30 is more than capable of doing this job, and it's available for around $15 retail, in single unit quantities from Digikey et al.
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