What's cool about this is that we're at the point where a committed hobbyist can pull something like this off.
I don't know what's in the FPGA, and I honestly don't know that much about FPGAs, but I imagine it's a pretty much "drag and drop" of the Lisa logic board schematic rendered in whatever FPGA language is used, while leveraging as many, stock, "off the shelf" cores as necessary.
It's telling that they externalized the UART, since they couldn't find a core to use, and weren't comfortable creating one from scratch. Otherwise it's likely a 68000 core, and a bunch of logic gates, or higher level combinatorial logic ICs (directly rendered into FPGA language, or, perhaps, they drag and dropped a, e.g. shift-register IC core).
But the point is that FPGAs are that accessible today.
Add to that the board manufacture. This is no hobbyist through hole exercise. Get the board, break out the soldering iron. No, this was built in a modern electronic assembly facility. Cheap enough to do one off boards, vs runs of 10s or 100s.
Available to the every man.
Impressive achievement for the developer, but impressive we're in a place that this is a practical thing to try and do.
I don't know what's in the FPGA, and I honestly don't know that much about FPGAs, but I imagine it's a pretty much "drag and drop" of the Lisa logic board schematic rendered in whatever FPGA language is used, while leveraging as many, stock, "off the shelf" cores as necessary.
It's telling that they externalized the UART, since they couldn't find a core to use, and weren't comfortable creating one from scratch. Otherwise it's likely a 68000 core, and a bunch of logic gates, or higher level combinatorial logic ICs (directly rendered into FPGA language, or, perhaps, they drag and dropped a, e.g. shift-register IC core).
But the point is that FPGAs are that accessible today.
Add to that the board manufacture. This is no hobbyist through hole exercise. Get the board, break out the soldering iron. No, this was built in a modern electronic assembly facility. Cheap enough to do one off boards, vs runs of 10s or 100s.
Available to the every man.
Impressive achievement for the developer, but impressive we're in a place that this is a practical thing to try and do.