This week, we’ve been working on our design and starting on the initial implementation: selecting a development board and proof-of-concepting software components.
Our largest risk right now is designing a system incompatible with our goals. Our development board and final platform must have the radios we need and sufficient resources for emulation, and be similar enough to prepare for the final integration. We’re managing this by keeping our high-level goals at top-of-mind and thinking through the stack. In case of an error, we can generally attach further peripherals or expansions through I2C or SPI.
We learned in research that the M68000 does not have the features we’d like for emulation. Instead, we’ll use a more familiar microcontroller (a la STM32) with sufficient performance to make ISA emulation tenable. This is a favorable switch: hardware has improved substantially since the 68k, more than making up for emulation overhead, and a modern platform has better HALs and development tooling available.
Lastly, we had the proposal submission and presentation. We’ve laid out our problem statement, set our design strategy, and created an initial timeline.