Gigatron Hackers

I had to try to make a DIY kit from budgetronics. Lack of skills probably didn't get it all working so ended up using it as spare. I ordered second one "Fully Assembled Gigatron TTL" from ebay and got it at reasonable price. When it arrived it was missing U39 serial input IC and another m...

Something else to consider would be if one wants to move beyond the Gigatron and still have compatibility with the Gigatron are alternatives to the GT1 format with new extensions. For instance, if one wants to use word RAM and move to a true 16-bit machine, one could use mostly the same format as th...

I think I know mods to do to a near-stock Gigatron. The more I've thought about it, what would happen if we could get rid of the control unit and also combine that with the carry-skip adder, and all the performance mods that have already been done? The control unit outputs 19 signals. Now, what if y...

I wish this project can continue. It sounds like an awesome ROM.

If worse comes to worst, clone it.

I've thought of other ways to mod the Gigatron. For instance, with an I/O expander board, why not connect the ports to it and let it provide the keyboard, video, and sound? The ports could be repurposed in the ROM to send/receive commands to the expander/controller. So you can even emulate interrupt...

Thank you Quertyface, this is helpful. I may still go ahead. I thank you for your honesty. The challenge is to provide all the functionality of the Gigatron without the native code and take advantage of an 8-cog P2. I honestly think it is possible. And if I pull that off, that would open the door to...

I don't know if I will make anything, but even if I don't, the information added here could help anyone who does. I've been considering making a machine that uses vCPU without the Gigatron. Using something such as the Propeller 2 microcontroller might be good since one has enough bandwidth and cores...

Apparently, the P2 has bytecode interpreter functions. So here is likely how a proposed architecture might look. 1. There should be a setup/supervisor cog. That can test/locate the memory, set up the memory map, display a menu, start the opening sound, provide a loader, and monitor the other cogs. F...

Come to think of it, 325 Mhz sounds appropriate based on how things work. Okay, the most common instructions take 2 cycles, you have 8 cogs competing for the common hub memory, and emulating at 3 times the target speed is probably a good rule of thumb. So multiplying all those, you get 48. But the h...