I think if you lay out your boards properly, and use vero-board with ground plane, you can use vero-wire (and wire-wrap) at pretty high frequencies (for the 80's) - There's a guy actually doing surface mount vero-wiring of boards: http://elm-chan.org/docs/wire/wiring_e.html
Incredible stuff..
That is quite amazing. Offhand, I would have simply dismissed vero wiring, surface mount IC's (excluding 0.1 pitch conversion boards) as being somewhat impossible. Because they don't do 0.1" pitched IC sockets.
Ground planes, and improved frequencies, is interesting as well.
Some of the parts (IC's), that are required for projects like these. Are becoming increasingly difficult to get hold of, in through hole packages, such as DIPs. So that method (you linked to), could still be useful, even on something like a mostly/all DIP IC packaged computer project. Because the odd chip(s) here and there, may be unavailable to you.
E.g. DIP SRAM chips.
So having that solution as a backup plan, in case you can't get hold of all the bits you need, is very useful.
- A bus monitor card might be nice to have, in the style and function of the altair front panel.
If you are trying to make me REALLY jealous and want to play with your computer, when it is finished. You are doing a VERY GOOD JOB!
Yes, the huge panels, with tons of flashing LEDs and nice quality toggle switches (or whatever), still looks really COOL!
I've thought about diagnostics/development cards in addition to the afforementionned cards.
- A bus monitor card might be nice to have, in the style and function of the altair front panel.
- Memory access card: A German Euro Card Bus // eurorack enthusiast made a card to decode the regions of memory accessed, by means of 74138's and latches. Looked very useful.
- Single-step and instruction step card: These existed for the S-100 (ALTAIR/IMSAI) systems, allowing single-stepping either one cycle or one instruction (8, 16 cycles i think).
Any other debug module one could add?
--Christoffer
If it was me...
There are a (somewhat) large number of modern "logic analyser", capability devices available, at reasonable prices, these days that I have heard about.
So unless you are trying to build it, only using equipment/tools that were available in the 1980s. Then I would seriously consider giving them a look into.
But building dedicated debug stuff, makes lots of sense as well.
In those days (and a decade later), there were VERY powerful (but sadly very expensive at the time, such as >$10,000), "proper", stand alone logic analyzers. They were amazingly powerful, and very, very useful.
You could capture the code using various triggers, while it was running at full speed, in real time.
When it triggers, you could see a fully disassembled listing (scroll-able) on screen, which was very useful for seeing what was going on.
Presumably such logic analysers (or their modern equivalents), are available used (or new in the case of the modern ones), on ebay (or test equipment sellers for new/modern stuff). At reasonable prices.