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My favourite computer... timing instruction placement on the drum. Juergen is actually planning to make a batch of kits later this year!
My late father was a maintenance technician for those things. He hated it when programmers did smart instruction placement to optimize drum timing. When the drum speed was a little off, they called him to calibrate it so their programs would run fast again.
But does Mel's blackjack program run on it? And does it cheat when you toggle the right switch?
Cute project!

> Xilinx tech support page and a forum post explaining how to get the Xilinx ISE to run under Windows 8 or Windows 10. Unfortunately Xilinx no longer maintains this development suite, but has also considered it unnecessary to support their Spartan 6 platform in the successor software suite, Vivado…

Wasn't the Spartan 6 also supported by the open source toolchains? I just did a couple seconds of search and I could only find the yosys support, but no nextpnr. Sad. Xilinx/AMD should open that up

I haven't done it, but 7-series is theoretically supported by SymbiFlow tools[0], even though the bitstream generation still requires Xilinx's bitgen.

[0]https://github.com/symbiflow

That's impressive. It looks like the original LGP-30 computer should have made IBM jealous.

> Oscilloscope monitors internal activity.

Now that is downright romantic. What other computer offers entertainment like this?

For a serial computer, an oscilloscope will easily do what a set of blinking lights will do for a parallel computer. By trading time for space it gives you a free serial to parallel conversion.
Why FPGA instead of a software emulation that would be way more accessible?