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PyCon: Eben Upton on the Raspberry PiPyCon: Eben Upton on the Raspberry PiPosted Mar 21, 2013 18:39 UTC (Thu) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784)In reply to: PyCon: Eben Upton on the Raspberry Pi by nix Parent article: PyCon: Eben Upton on the Raspberry Pi
The hardware above the chip level was documented in the manuals for the Acorn machines and I've seen a pretty thorough manual for the Amstrad CPC series that upholds this level of documentation. Most of the ICs were commodity components, and the only notable exceptions in the Acorn machines (and in the Sinclair machines) were the ULAs, for which you did get a block diagram in the former case. Ignoring the physical reverse engineering done on various ULAs, particularly the successful work done on the Spectrum's ULA, it is completely possible to logically reverse engineer these components, and I believe that various emulators actually achieve reasonable accuracy. An interesting test would be to actually try and use such software to drive the hardware and see how compatible the implementation is, although I imagine that you'd need to put work in to do things like refresh the DRAM and other bus signalling that "just happens" in an emulator. Of course, the software in the microcomputers of that era was proprietary and disassembly listings that were actually published in books did lead to legal action. So some things haven't changed at all. (I wrote this stuff up here.)
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