Kestrel 2DX

Hello, and welcome to the Fossil repository for the Kestrel 2DX computer. This computer is not intended to be a full-featured computer. Rather, its purpose is to be a test-mule for software and cores intended to bring up external RAM on FPGA development systems. For the my full home computer vision, please refer to the Kestrel-3 project.

That said, you can still have plenty of fun with this little machine. The documentation on this site will help the interested reader to better understand the computer hardware and ROM-resident BIOS software.

Documentation

• Motivation: Why Bother?
• About the Kestrel-2DX

Programming Resources

• BIOS Programmer's Reference
• Memory Map
• GPIA Registers
• KIA Registers

Building a Kestrel-2DX

• Building

Checklists

• Release Checklist

Ideas For the Future

Not all of these are guaranteed to see the light of day.

• Nexys-2 Memory Expansion Port
• SL5 Filesystem

Project/Organizational Resources

• Development Roadmap

About the Name

It's kind of an inside joke, a play on the Commodore 64DX.

Why Use Fossil?

I use my Github account for public-facing developments. This exploration is intended to remain private to me. Making it private has the following consequences:

• It reduces my sense of responsibility to my project's followers.
• It gives me the freedom to change things as needs require, without having to maintain excessive history in Github.

If this project works like I hope it will, I will almost certainly port everything in this repository over to the official Git repository. But, not until then! (I might even just include the whole fossil repo as a binary blob in the Git repo.)