VB68k
Summary
A minimalistic 68000 retro board with 256 kBytes of ROM and 16 kBytes of RAM. It was built in 2002. Today, some people even call computers from the early 2000s retro.
Background Story
A friend of mine and I found an old Amiga 500. Nobody I knew in 2002 still cared much about actually using an Amiga or playing games on one, so it landed in the trash. And yes, we picked it up. Of course we had to look inside. I’m not even sure that at the time I had heard much about the 68000 CPU used in the Amiga. But for some reason it sparked our interest, and we wanted to just “test if the CPU would run”.
As we had just taken courses in Computer Architecture, we basically knew how a computer system was built.
Theoretically. Basically.
But we accepted the challenge and read a bit. […] some tough days and weeks later, after reading, trials, errors, etching, soldering, reading again, debugging […] We had that board.
Unfortunately the selected I/O chip was not really compatible with the 68000 bus protocol. Thus, we had to completely rely on status LEDs to indicate something.
Spoiler: Yes… it worked. But will it still work today?
Stay tuned, to be continued…