The µMark-8 Project

Building a Mark-8 is an expensive and difficult project.  This is partly due to the large number of components, and the high cost of some of them, particularly the memory and paddle switches.  I thought it would be an interesting project to make a simple (in terms of part count) and relatively inexpensive version of the Mark-8 using modern technology and components for everything except the 8008 itself.

The design incorporates the following ideas:

Front side, component positions and silkscreen. Actual size is 6.3" x 3.9" (Eurocard 100 x 160 mm).

The pushbuttons are ITT type D6, the larger LEDs are T1-3/4 clear case red (to match the original), the status LEDs for the buttons are SMT.  The side connectors are just 0.1" pin headers soldered onto the board on both sides; the 'To PC' one goes to the PC's parallel port via a straight cable.

Back side, components (reversed "look-through-top" view)

The bottom-most chip (the FPGA configuration PROM) is going to be changed to DIP-8, as I found a stock of Atmel EEPROMs in that form factor.  The DIP-8 will be surface mounted by folding its legs up so it doesn't go through to the UI side of the board.

Current schematic (Eagle)
Current board (Eagle)
VHDL files