The hardware prototype

Here you see the result of the effort Vince Slyngstad and I did over several weeks of exchanging e-mails.
This is the prototype of the Core Board, after I spent a few hours of soldering and checking. The real dimensions of the Core board are 127 x 90 mm. The prototype boards were made by Olimex, a company in Bulgaria. They are cheap when you want to develop just one board.
Click on the picture to view the board in more detail.
(419 kb, 1576 x 1116 pixels).

You can download the final version of the electronic diagrams and the board lay-out here:

diagram and lay-out of the Core Board (75 kb)
diagram and lay-out of the I/O Board (49 kb)

Each zip file contains two files. The .brd file has the board lay-out, the .sch file is the electrical diagram.
To view these files you must download the Eagle CAD package from Cadsoft. It is free when you want to view the files, but you need to buy a license to change things, as these boards are bigger than the size what the free version allows you to work with.

This is the prototype of the I/O Board, which also took a few hours of soldering and checking. The real dimensions of the I/O board are the same as the Core Board.
Click on the picture to view the board in more detail.
(522 kb, 1576 x 1116 pixels).

If you do not want to go with a proprietary format, here are the Gerber files:

Gerber file Core Board (67 kb)
Gerber file I/O Board (46 kb)

Of course, no project is complete without some documentation.
Click the cover sheet at the right to download the latest version of the manual (2.6 Mb).
The manual contains (among others) the following chapters:

Parts listing for the Core Board and I/O Board
Building and configuring the "Real Console"
Introduction to the "Real Console"
- Operating modes of the Real Console
- Brief hardware and firmware description
- An example: "The implementation of the PDP-11/40 console"
- How to implement the required modifications to SIMH
Appendices
- Command summary of the monitor CORESYS09
- Protocol description of the Real Console
- Detailed hardware description
- I/O Board load calculations
- Firmware description

The major components of the Core Board are the Motorola MC6809E microprocessor, ACIA MC6850 for the RS-232 serial interface, the PIA MC6821 to connect to the I/O Board, 8kbytes RAM and 16kbytes EPROM which holds the RealConsole application and a simple monitor to analyse programs, set a breakpoint, do some disassembly, etc. The usual stuff you would expect in a monitor program.
Here is the link to the software. It contains the COREsys monitor v1.5 and the RealConsole application v1.3.
The zip file (170 kb) includes the source file, the S19 Motorola S-record file and the "make" batch file.