Yet another old microcomputer in a FPGA :) This time, the "victim" is the Thomson MO5, a machine based on the Motorola 6809E microprocessor. This machine sold well in France, especially because Thomson was the company chosen by the French governement to try to "bring microcomputing to the masses", back in the 80s.

Now, some explanations about the project itself : as most of my Hector-related project is done, I had the idea to do something similar for the Thomson MO/TO microcomputers. A bit of googling led me to a thread in Logicielsmoto.com forums, where someone was saying that he made the implementation of the Thomson MO5 main component (a gate-array used for video and glue logic) into a CPLD. I managed to contact him, with the help of the Serveur87.com mailing list people. The author of the gate-array reimplementation accepted to share his work, and I managed to put things together using the System09's 6809 core, and writing a 6821 core. And here is the result :



Sorry for the bad picture, but that's all I can do for now... as the project is not finished. For instance there is no keyboard interface (EDIT : it is done now). But most of the system seems to work : CPU, ROM, RAM, video, interrupts...

I would especially like to thank :

• Pierre Schmidt (Whitebird), author of the gate-array CPLD conversion. He is the person to give credit for this project, as without him, it would probably not exist.
• Edouard Forler (FoolDuplex), who helped Pierre with his design, then helped me to contact Pierre, and for his advice.
  

EDIT : I just finished the keyboard interface today, now I can play with MO5 BASIC :) I've also updated the picture (click on it to get the full-size one).