Motorola's 68000 processor falls into the category of legendary CPUs, primarily because it was one of the first 32-bit CPU designs to appear and was deemed one of the fastest models of its time. Recently podstawek, a member of an electronics enthusiast community, resurrected the Motorola 68000 Educational Computer Board by using a Raspberry Pi 4.
The Motorola 68000 Educational Computer Board was made by Motorola to train engineers to implement their code on the m68k platform. However, at the time, there were no modern I/O ports like we have today, and the systems used a completely different set of I/O.
If you want to play with the board today, you'll need something to adapt it to the modern setup, and that is where podstawek's implementation with a Raspberry Pi comes to life.
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The user managed to get the m86k platform running by connecting a Raspberry Pi 4 board to it. The RPi4 used the RS232 Hat for expansion, where the user connected serial and 12 V ports to the m68k for control. Upon further setup and debugging, the terminal commands made on RPi4 are sent to the Motorola board for control functions.
In the blog post and video above, the user shows the whole process of getting the board up and running and even showcases the work needed to create a small acrylic case for the Motorola board and adapt a modern ATX power supply to power the old computer. That's how he brought the 40-year-old board back to life and used it to experiment with the old technology.
