Dear friends,
I am proud to announce the successful completion of my newest FPGA project, OberonStation http://oberonstation.x10.mx . It started here: viewtopic.php?f=10&t=3372 and has grown a bit.

The board targets Niklaus Wirth's and Jürg Gutknecht Project Oberon 2013 http://projectoberon.com (if you are not familiar with it, please check it out), and over a dozen of these boards are used to teach Oberon at ETH. The support of the Oberon community is an assurance that these boards are functioning properly and will be available in the future. Paul Reed (who along with Prof. Wirth created the Oberon RISC bitstream) collaborated with me to port Oberon hardware to OberonStation, and Oberon boots in about 1 second from the uSD card.

It is a great board for 16 and 32-bit 6502 derivatives. It is a full-featured XC3S700AN system with a reset button, 8 leds, 4 jumpers, 64-color VGA, uSD slot as well as PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports. It has one megabyte of 10ns static RAM (configurable as 8, 16 or 32-bits wide), and as far as I know is the only board you can buy today with asynchronous 32-bit SRAM on board. There is also plenty of IO with two 8-bit PMOD-like ports, a 5-bit aux port, a 3.3V serial port and a 60 pin high-density connector.

I have a bunch of these reserved for our community, in case anyone is interested. I'd love to see a 16- or 32- bit 6502 derivative stand-alone computer with graphics in the near future, if anyone wants to collaborate. Please contact me here or via http://oberonstation.x10.mx to get one.

edit: updated Project Oberon information

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In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. ...Jan van de Snepscheut

Nice idea - I can't argue with 32-bit wide SRAM! And Oberon is a very interesting project: originally a modular HLL suitable for self-hosting and OS development, now includes the OS and even the RISC CPU to run on it. (We say RISC, but it has multi-cycle multiply and divide, and also single-precision floating point...) Ah, and I see it's open source too!

(I don't know of any commercial offering with 32-bit wide SRAM either, but the Matchbox Copro mentioned elsewhere has been built and sold in one small batch, with a second batch expected later this year. That's a tiny board with very few connectors, unlike yours, as it's for a different purpose.)

As for building out a graphical computer using a 65Org16 or another wide-byte 6502 variant, that could be interesting: I've opened a thread to see who has an interest in these wide CPUs.

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(Just to note, this FPGA board would similarly be of interest to other CPU design adventurers here - not just for the wide-byte CPUs.)

It looks interesting but I would have to read up on it and get more information. I would like to know more about it.

What would you like to know? I am happy to answer any questions.

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In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. ...Jan van de Snepscheut

Project Oberon was an eye-opener for me -- to design a complete desktop computer system from scratch! It includes a compiler, an Operating System, and a purpose-built RISC core.

"Its simplicity and clarity enables a single person to know and implement the entire system [ ], while still providing enough power to make it useful and usable in a production environment." "[I]t is not an academic toy, but rather a versatile workstation system that has found many satisfied and even enthusiastic users in academia and industry."

Can you give us an idea of some of the things people have been doing with this? (Sorry if I'm straying slightly from the subject of your particular board!)

thanks,
Jeff

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In 1988 my 65C02 got six new registers and 44 new full-speed instructions!
https://laughtonelectronics.com/Arcana/ ... mmary.html

I wish I was an Oberon expert, but I am a newb technically and as the Oberon culture goes. I carried the 'Project Oberon' book with me since it was published, and always wished that I could play with this:

So I was really excited about Project Oberon 2013, but of course there was no hardware to run it on. I spent the last few months mucking around with hardware instead of Oberon.

I know people do all kinds of things with Oberon, including making rocket engines. The compiler generates pretty good code as it's 'impedance matched' to the CPU. There is no assembler (I asked, and was shamed). The idea of a self-contained system that boots in a second has always been very appealing. I hope someone makes some kind of a secure communications workstation around it, as the internet and our PCs are very questionable.

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In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. ...Jan van de Snepscheut

I had a similar thought, about a trusted compute node. But it looks like even the networking is different from what we're used to. I'm not even sure it's Ethernet, let alone TCP/IP. Better to write an SSL layer in Oberon, or port a conventional C-based OS to the CPU? Some other thoughts can be found at this discussion on HN.

There's an in-browser emulator, but I don't understand how to drive the user interface!
http://schierlm.github.io/OberonEmulator/

The Oberon UI is very interesting, as it branches off Xerox UI into a different direction than Lisa/Windows. There is the system track on the right, and applications tile windows on the left. Text can be live, and highlighted text can become the object of commands (which are in the form of Module.Function form). Middle button is 'execute'. There is a bunch of inter-clicks (as in select with one button, then click another) to copy and paste.

http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/04/22/oberon/ is a good read about the speciation of UIs

http://www.ethoberon.ethz.ch/ethoberon/tutorial/Mouse.contents.html may help, although it's for a different incarnation of Oberon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberon_(operating_system) is a good starting point

https://github.com/pdewacht/oberon-risc-emu is an Oberon RISC emulator that behaves just like OberonStation (but isn't as cool as having an Oberon machine, of course

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In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. ...Jan van de Snepscheut

If I found a cave man and tried to show him BASIC, how much would he know?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberon_(operating_system)

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Nice talk - ("Reviving a computer system of 25 years ago - Wirth, 2014") - also at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXY78gPMvl0
Slides are here: http://wirth-symposium.ethz.ch/slides/wirth.pdf

Thanks!

I've been looking for this picture, thanks!

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In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. ...Jan van de Snepscheut