Few people have heard of it, yet many consider John Blankenbaker's KENBAK-1 to be the first commercial personal computer.
Vintage Arcade Hardware Emulator
By James Grahame
The FPGA Arcade Replay board can be configured to emulate classic video game and home computer hardware, including the Atari ST and Amiga. We first wrote about it almost 2 years ago, but it's finally nearing release.
MikeJ says, "The board will support all the games on the FPGA Arcade site, as well as my Atari ST core and a customized and supported MiniMig Amiga core. Other platforms such as BBC B, Commodore 64 and Spectrum will also follow shortly.
The board has an ARM processor which interfaces the FPGA to the SD card. Hard disk images, ROMs and floppy disk images can be used from the SD card. There are two expansion boards, one with TV out and some rear mounted connectors for the joysticks (fits in a mini-itx case), and a second board with a prototyping array. There are around 130 pins available on the expansion connector.
The board has DVI and Analogue out. The DVI connector can be used to drive a HDMI input of a flat screen TV, so you can play PacMan on the big screen. I am planning to do Asteroids in true 1080P :) The analogue audio output uses a very high quality Wolfson DAC."
The Replay board already emulates the original arcade hardware for Scramble/Frogger, Asteroids Deluxe, Space Invaders, Pac Man, Lady Bug and Galaxian. Supported gaming consoles will include the Odyssey 2, ColecoVision, Bally Astrocade, and the Adventure Vision. This promises to be very cool indeed.
