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Old 4th Oct 2019, 10:30 pm   #1
dominicbeesley
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Join Date: Nov 2004
Location: Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, UK.
Posts: 1,885
Default Acorn System 1 clone

I've recently had a few spare hours and decided to have a look at the original Acorn System 1. As these are quite rare I decided the best way to find out about this was to make one. Armed with the datasheet for the INS8154 chip and the circuit diagrams and manuals for the system 1 I've made an FPGA clone...and it seems to work

It works well with all 128 bytes of RAM and 512k bytes of ROM!

There's a video of it here: https://youtu.be/5R9nzFvlU3A in shake-o-vision running the game program "duck shoot" that is near the end of the user manual. I've added a "faux" cassette interface - which is actually just a 300 baud serial interface so I can save and load to my PC!

I'm now planning to make a real (i.e. with real IC's not an fpga) clone my first stumbling block is where/how to get a case. The eurocard rack systems do seem to still be made but are eye-wateringly expensive does anyone know where to look for suitable junk. I'd like to make a System 4 or 5 which had the System 1 at its heart but with additional cards holding ram and disk controllers etc.

System 5

D
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