Q1 Computer Core Possible?

[akeley]

I randomly stumbled upon this article about a found-in-the-attic prehistoric computer: https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/t ... s-32146932

I must admit I've never heard about it (or forgot if I did) and was quite surprised to see how good looking and complete (ie as "real" computers) they look for 1972 - where the likes of Kenbak and Altair had only some blinking leds and switches, this one sports a more advanced display and a proper keyboard. After a brief look seems only Datapoint 2200 from 1970 has been made like that in this regard?

This machine is based on Intel 8008. I wonder if a core for MiSTer would be possible? (sorry if it has been mentioned before)
There is a github repo with rom dumps and schematics available, courtesy of The Byte Attic.
https://www.thebyteattic.com/p/q1.html
https://github.com/TheByteAttic/Q1/tree/main

[ExCyber]

That does look like an interesting machine, though I'm not sure how complete the currently available information and ROM dumps are.

The unit documented by The Byte Attic is a later Z80 version ca. late 1978 ("7837" date code on the UC1671 chip), and the schematic is unfortunately only for the main board. That might be enough to do something interesting with the serial port, and the display/keyboard interface could probably be reverse-engineered from the firmware behavior to get something usable, but I think it would take further hardware documentation to reproduce it accurately.

There are some good photos of the display/keyboard board, but I don't know from just browsing through them if they're enough to figure out the connections. There's also an EPROM that I'm not sure about; this might be the "language ROM", but the language ROM file labeled with an identifier ("U42") doesn't match the silkscreen scheme ("IC59" or "IC60"; I guess one is the socket and one is the chip), so I'm not sure what to make of that.