Bringing PCI Bus Support to the Classic Motorola 68000
The Motorola 68000 was introduced in 1979, while the PCI bus didn’t start appearing in computers until more than a decade later. The two technologies come from very different eras, but there isn’t any fundamental reason why they can’t work together. PCI was specifically designed to be processor-independent, after all. Proving that point, hardware hacker Piotr Grzesik built a homebrew Motorola 68000 computer with two functional PCI slots.
Grzesik took on the project primarily as a way to learn how PCI works at a low level. Before starting the computer, he reverse engineered a proprietary PCI card containing a Xilinx Spartan II XC2S100 FPGA. He then wrote his own VHDL implementation of the PCI protocol, eventually getting the card recognized by a PC, assigning it a Base Address Register (BAR), and communicating with its internal memory.
An FPGA interfaces the PCI bus with the CPU (📷: Piotr Grzesik)
With that...
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