Andrew Owen | Writer

Retro spotlight: Jeri Ellsworth and the FPGA computer

Jeri Ellsworth turns 50 this year. Her first job was building and racing cars, but in 2002 she kicked off the FPGA computer revolution with the C-One. Since 2012 she’s been working on augmented reality (AR) at Valve, castAR and now Tilt Five. At around the same time she was working on the C-One, I was working on an enhanced Timex Sinclair 2068. The projects converged in 2011, but I’ll get to that. First, a quick explanation of what an FPGA is and isn’t.

Running Xilinx ISE on an M1 Mac

Back in March 2022, I did a write-up of how to run Xilinx Vivado on an M1 Mac to generate cores for the Artix-7 series of FPGAs (as used on the Mega 65). The easiest solution is to run the Intel binaries on ARM Windows under Parallels Desktop. But it’s also possible to use the Linux binaries with UTM.

Updating a 40-year-old computer design

In my last article, I wrote a lot about the development of the firmware for my hobbyist microcomputer project that became the Chloe 280SE. In this companion article, I’ll cover the hardware. I’m not sure how relevant any of this is going to be to modern development, but I think it’s worth telling the other half of the story. But to tell that story, first I need to tell the story of the time when Timex made computers.

Running Xilinx Vivado on an M1 Mac

I’ve written before about running non-Apple Intel binaries on an M1 Mac. The solutions I discussed work for most general purpose apps, but there was one app in particular that I’d previously been running on Windows 10, that I really wanted to get working on an M1 Mac: Xilinx Vivado.