PiDP-1, or the rebirth of an old machine(hackaday.io) |
PiDP-1, or the rebirth of an old machine(hackaday.io) |
The photos don't show it but you can also have your PiDP-1 in white instead of blue. It will come with both sets of front panels.
Does anyone know if MIDAS has been recreated for it or not?
A bit of the hint on the PPT reader, which would be awesome, the rp2xxx chips PIO can handle that with ease. As the PDP1 doesn't have take-up it is pretty trivial to make at 'historic' speeds. Obviously punching is much more difficult.
I looked into it for quite a bit, but not having access to tapes, puncher, supplies etc... I gave up on the idea as the PiDP-10 will scratch my personal nostalgia itch a bit more right now.
A real tape reader would be great and is something we are considering for the future, but without a punch it's not very satisfying. There will be a paper tape visualization though (currently writing the code for that).
I love that book
All very interesting reads.
So with the PiDP-1, we figured out how to make the entire case from FR4 panels. As there are no Iconic Curves in a PDP-1 case. Turns out this is the sturdiest PiDP yet!
We hope to get some interest from the democoder community. Writing games and demos for the PDP-1's Type 30 display is so much more fun than pushing pixels on a C64 :-)
The pdp-1 "demoscene" has been rather inactive for ~6 decades now :) Our hope is to breathe some new life into it.
Would be interesting to get some modern demo coders onto it to see what was possible.
As this was a RetroChallenge project, there's also project blog: https://www.masswerk.at/rc2016/10/
As there is no memory or frame buffer involved, the display resolution is pretty high, at 1024 × 1024 display locations (with a "visual resolution" of about 512 × 512, because dot size depends on the intensity and display locations may overlap), but drawing a line across the screen is pretty expensive in terms of runtime. Hence the complexity and fluency of a "display hack" depends largely on the number of dots drawn and maintained.
On the plus side, display commands are pretty simple and straight forward, put one coordinate in the accumulator and the other one in the IO register and off you go. Acording to Marvin Minsky computer graphics just went into decline after this.
Regarding modern and contemporary coders, there are really few tricks that haven't been explored with Spacewar! already. (Mind that Steve Russell was also the programmer, who gave us Lisp.) Spacewar! does all calculations in realtime, without referring to lookup tables, but, otherwise, this is pretty advanced, even featuring a JIT compiler (by Dan Edwards, who is important for the history of Lisp, as well) for the configurable spaceship outlines.
Having said that, the PDP-1 has a pretty fascinating while simple instruction set (including universal indirection), which lends itself especially well to assembler programming, and should be a source of previously unknown joy for any modern coder.
I completely understand the difficulty with simulating peripherals. Perhaps the FPGA could focus on implementing the CPU, leaving the peripherals to a SIMH backend using a hybrid approach. A slightly longer PCB with space for both a DE10-nano and an RPi 0 might work out well.
Have you considered opening a discussion on VCFED or Google Groups to gather more ideas and see what others think? I’m sure many people would be excited to follow and contribute to that progress.
I'm looking forward to seeing how this develops.