These are the major components of my StarShip.

• The StarShip simulator itself, of course.
  The simulator itself has 3 consoles in front of a chair. The chair can rotate in the horizontal plane so that the captain in the seat can sit comfortably in front of the console that needs his attention. A small panel at the right side of the chair has a few switches that activates a motor to move the chair to the consoles or away from the consoles. This makes getting in and out of the StarShip easy.

• The simulator main computer.
  The main computer is a VME rack based processor board with a Motorola 68020 CPU clocked at 30 MHz. On the processor board is also integrated 4 Mbytes on dynamic RAM (at 1 wait-state), a simple monitor in EPROM, two RS-232 serial communication lines and a 3½" high density floppy disk interface.
  Additional boards in the VME rack are the following:
  • EPROM board, start address at $600000
  • RAM board, start address at $400000
  • 2 home-made boards
    each has 16 bit parallel I/O and a simple 512 dots x 256 line B/W video generator
  • 1 home-made board
    that has a 16-bit parallel I/O with handshake and a SP0256-AL2 phoneme (speech) generator
  I got from eBay an 68040 VME board and in the future I will investigate how much performance gain this board will give over the current 68020 board. If I choose the 68040 board I will have to make a few adaptations to the system software. However, a nice thing to mention is that the 68040 CPU is also used in the X-38 "Crew Return Vehicle" (CRV) of the International Space Station, ISS. The X-38 is a 'life boat' to return 7 astronauts safely to Earth in case of an emergency.
  The Motorola 68040 of the X-38 is clocked at 33 MHz and runs the Wind River OS (VxWorks 5.4) and is reponsible for navigation, flight control, life support, communication and propulsion when the Vehicle leaves the orbit.

• The simulator controller console.
  This is a video monitor for a standard analog video signal and a keyboard.
  The keyboard is home-made from a Keytronics ASCII keyboard and a video controller single board computer (Solder It Yourself kit) with the Intel CRTC and an F8 microprocessor. I bought the source listing of the firmware and made a few modifications to the code to support a sort of a "status line".   I have this keyboard/video kit since 1978 as the original interface to my first home-made computer, Motorola 6800 based. Intel has never convinced me to their instruction set, duh.