An interesting talk here from Alex Anderson-McLeod, the ups and downs of developing an FPGA model (and a custom PCB) to create an open source Lisa - which can run at stock speed or at 75MHz. We learn about FPGA developments and about the Lisa implementation (which includes both the 68000 and a 6504 core). Quite a few steps within involve reverse engineering software or firmware to find out what’s happening.
The project is mostly there but there are some things still to do.
From the description
Have you ever wanted to mess around with a “real” Apple Lisa, but haven’t been able to because of how rare they are? Well, there’s finally a solution! Alex has spent the last 9 months implementing the entirety of the Lisa inside an FPGA (no software emulation of any kind) and designing a low-cost PCB around it with plenty of nice modernizations and improvements over the original machine. In this presentation, Alex will discuss his efforts to complete this project and the insane challenges he faced along the way, complete with a deep dive into the design of the physical PCB and the Lisa itself in SystemVerilog. If you love Lisas, hardware design, or FPGAs, you won’t be disappointed!
From Alex’s own channel:
Yes, the project will be fully open-source. Give me a few weeks to finish things up and to order/test the Rev. 3 boards, but then you should be able to find it in the LisaFPGA repo on my GitHub page alexthecat123 (Alex Anderson-McLeod) · GitHub
See previously
Apple Lisa Source Code
Apple Lisa vs. Xerox Star 8010 (video)
