The Gigatron Community

Using, learning, programming and modding the Gigatron and anything related.
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monsonite
Posts: 101
Joined: 17 May 2018, 07:17

The Gigatron Community

Post by monsonite »

I wrote this yesterday but realised that it should have had it's own topic.

Gigatron is a continually evolving platform with a vibrant community.

It's barely more than 2 years since Marcel started with an empty breadboard and a bag of TTL chips. In response to today's Hackaday posting I decided to list all the things that this project and community have achieved in the last year.

A PC based emulator that runs the native assembly language.
A 16-bit virtual machine “vCPU” converting the 8-bit Harvard architecture to 16-bit Von Neumann architecture.
A higher level control language GCL.
An Arduino interface to allow program loading
An on-screen hex editor/monitor program based on Steve Wozniak’s “WozMon”
A 64K byte RAM upgrade
Tiny BASIC with support for colour graphics and sound
A PS/2 keyboard adaptor
A Gigatron emulated using an STM32F407 ARM Cortex M4
A ROM emulator based on SRAM to allow rapid changes to made to ROM contents
An expansion board to provide connectivity to SPI devices – including SDcards
A high resolution video mode
A Gigatron with integrated keyboard – all on one pcb
Two variants of the pcb – respun with 4 layers
Custom modifications to the instruction set
An experimental overclocked Gigatron using 74Fxx series TTL running at 12.5MHz - with a strong possibility of 15MHz.
And this week’s announcement of a C compiler, which will allow greater accessibility.

Gigatron has been demonstrated at Hacker and computer festivals in Belgrade, Berlin, Zurich, Pasadena, Seattle, Cambridge (UK), Shanghai, Lisbon, Eindhoven and Saarbrucken.

May the project continue to be so fruitful with the support of the wider community.
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