I thought people here might be interested in this. It’s the V3 Z-Machine implemented in an FPGA so Z-code runs natively without an interpreter. Presumably the first ever implementation in hardware as no one else would be crazy enough to do it To avoid any suggestion of cheating I purposely didn’t microcode the CPU (if I had it could be argued it’s still an interpreter) so not particularly efficient in terms of number of gates used but still fits on very cheap (<£10) FPGA dev boards.
The virtual machine of course expects some sort of terminal to be present so I implemented this in a BIOS (written using a hack version of Inform with a couple extra opcodes added to allow interaction with a screen). I ended up with 3-4Kb free space in the BIOS so I added a Space Invaders clone as an easter egg too.
Nice work! Could this thing possibly be implemented with discrete logic chips? See homebrewcpu.org/ for an example of someone using discrete logic to build a general purpose computer about the size of a breadbox.
To avoid any suggestion of cheating I purposely didn’t microcode the CPU (if I had it could be argued it’s still an interpreter) so not particularly efficient in terms of number of gates used but still fits on very cheap (<£10) FPGA dev boards.