With the recent revival of the thread about an LOS accelerator, I thought that it might be a good idea to have a quicker, easier, and cheaper way to prototype and test new Lisa hardware. And also a way for people to have a 100% authentic Lisa experience (no emulation) without having to buy or build an actual Lisa. So I figured I'd try and implement the entire machine in SystemVerilog on an FPGA.
I'm still pretty early into the project right now, so there's a decent chance of failure or it taking forever, but I figured I'd at least tell everybody about it.
So far, I've written SystemVerilog modules for the 512K RAM board and the CPU board. I'm in the process of testing and debugging them right now, and needless to say, there are still a LOT of problems to work out. But most of the timing logic (Page 2 of the CPU board schematic) seems great, and I just got the CPU to start fetching instructions from the ROM, although it's clear that it gets stuck pretty quick. The video state machine seems mostly functional too, although I think there's some signal contention messing something up there. So it's just slow incremental progress, chipping away at each failure until I slowly get closer to a working CPU board. I think there are some serious problems with the MMU, so that one might take a little while.
I'm going to wait and do the I/O board once I get the CPU and RAM boards fully-working (or at least as fully-working as I can test without the I/O board). If I remember correctly, a Lisa without an I/O board should boot loop with some sort of error on the screen, so this should be a good enough configuration to validate minimal functionality of most of the CPU board and RAM hardware.
I'll keep you guys posted on my progress, or lack thereof!