By coincidence (searching for something PDP-8 specific, the “*” prompt), I found this on opencores.
I never heard of Digilent Nexys. It’s still available but expensive. Nowadays, there are much cheaper FPGAs.
But most expensive is a good panel and parts like the levers, anyway.
Interesting photo of the inside.
https://opencores.org/projects/pdp8/implementations
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Very nice to make up a front panel like that! I do like a toggle switch.
Many FPGAs are now difficult to find, or much more expensive than they used to be. I suppose it’s possible these kinds of dev boards are still available at the old prices, as they were always sold in order to gain market share.
@drogon did try out a different flavour… a Gowin-powered Tang Nano which is cheap and available. No idea what the toolchain might be like though. Edit: seems to be an open source option!
My suspicion is that any PDP is small enough that any FPGA would be big enough, more or less, so it’s mostly about what you’ve got in a drawer, what you can get hold of, and what the toolchain is like.
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Spare Time Gizmos once did a PDP 8 using the PDP-8 microchip,
as well as front panel. It was small PCB. They still seem to have down loadable
files for the PCB’s, and some software tools.
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I mentioned that site on my Festo and Intersil 6100 threads.
It also has the WinEight emulator, I recently checked. And the tools.
More on my “Help reading EPROM Intersil” thread.