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this is pretty old but good nevertheless. Prof Edwards was my prof last year and advised my group on our senior design project!
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Great stuff. I'd love to see people use FPGAs to create new oddball architectures too, really weird and fun stuff and not only recreate the past.
Do you have ideas for features for some new oddball architectures?

An obstacle is that you need both the hardware, and an operating system, making for a much larger undertaking. Whereas if you were to clone an Atari ST you'd get both mindshare (lots of people are very fluent in 68000 machine code and and that architecture specifically) plus a lot of existing software.

If you're looking to play with some unusual stuff, you can get PandaBoard or BealgBoard kits for under USD 250 including SD card, cables and power adapter. They're ARM architectures with custom chips. I'm playing with PandaBoard at the moment.

I bet there would be PPC equivalents. Starting point: http://yellowdoglinux.com/support/hardware/

Has anyone tried to recreate an Alto, a Lilith or a Lisp Machine using FPGAs? Would they fit?