Anders Magnusson recently embarked on a mission to determine if the VAX architecture could still be implemented efficiently. Armed with a 15-year-old demo board featuring a low-end FPGA, Magnusson learned Verilog and successfully implemented the VAX architecture. He even ran the EVKAA.EXE test, which it passed with flying colors. Magnusson plans to increase the FPGA’s speed to about 80MHz and is currently utilizing approximately 70% of the available resources. While he has yet to implement memory management, he believes it shouldn’t be too difficult. Magnusson’s achievement marks the first new VAX implementation in 30 years.
https://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-vax/2021/07/03/msg003899.html