Cool! You too can pretend that you built an early microcomputer, turned it into a successful product, built a huge company, and became famous and wealthy beyond your wildest imagination. But first you have to figure out how to get past the advertising page on the IEEE website.
What I need to do is restore the original Altair 8800 I already own. It mainly needs a severe cleaning of dirt and dust, plus likely capacitor reforming or replacement in the PSU; I have yet to plug it into power, because it would likely burst into flames. Once I get it working, I would then need to find some sheet-metal shop to custom build me a top for the enclosure. It didn't come with one, and the original manufacturer of the case stopped making the case several years back, and doesn't have the plans any longer...
Or you could hide an Arduino Due and a couple of batteries between two of the system boards and say you restored it, would save a lot of work... :)
More seriously, how about using wood for the enclosure top (if RFI is a problem, a layer of tinfoil on the inner side may be enough)? It'd be a lot cheaper: I build most of the cases I make for Spectrum's Hands On projects using basswood because it's cheap, strong, and usually a faster process than e.g. 3D printing an enclosure.
But seriously, it pains me to hear of people who buy collectors' items and let them rot into worthlessness. Why not sell it and give someone else a shot at actually restoring it? Or at the very least clean it up enough that it can be stored for a long period of time with information about what it is. So should the worst happen, whoever it is going through your belongings can recognize it as something that's been cared for and not something to be tossed in the trash.
The Arduino Due version runs Altair code at the speed of the original Altair, i.e. 2 MHz. (The Mega 2560 version runs at about 25% the speed of the original Altair) If you want Altair code to run significantly faster, you should probably use one of the software emulators on a PC and see if you can turn off their speed throttling. (The Due's underlying clock speed is 84 Mhz, which is zippy for an Arduino, but nothing compared to what a desktop CPU can do).
But unfortunately you're still not going to get to 1 GHz this way: modern PC CPUs clock in around 3 GHz, and it's going to take more than three PC clock cycles to emulate 1 Altair cycle on average. At the 42:1 ratio of the Due to Altair, 3 GHz is going to get you about 72 MHz. Let's say though you're super clever and you use profiling, etc. that lets you use multiple cores and whatnot. Even if you get a 4x boost and bring the ratio down to 10 PC clock cycles per Altair clock cycle, you'll still top out at 300 MHz.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 37.6 ms ] threadMore seriously, how about using wood for the enclosure top (if RFI is a problem, a layer of tinfoil on the inner side may be enough)? It'd be a lot cheaper: I build most of the cases I make for Spectrum's Hands On projects using basswood because it's cheap, strong, and usually a faster process than e.g. 3D printing an enclosure.
But seriously, it pains me to hear of people who buy collectors' items and let them rot into worthlessness. Why not sell it and give someone else a shot at actually restoring it? Or at the very least clean it up enough that it can be stored for a long period of time with information about what it is. So should the worst happen, whoever it is going through your belongings can recognize it as something that's been cared for and not something to be tossed in the trash.
Else I'm still waiting for something to run 8-bit code at over 1Ghz.
But unfortunately you're still not going to get to 1 GHz this way: modern PC CPUs clock in around 3 GHz, and it's going to take more than three PC clock cycles to emulate 1 Altair cycle on average. At the 42:1 ratio of the Due to Altair, 3 GHz is going to get you about 72 MHz. Let's say though you're super clever and you use profiling, etc. that lets you use multiple cores and whatnot. Even if you get a 4x boost and bring the ratio down to 10 PC clock cycles per Altair clock cycle, you'll still top out at 300 MHz.