[Jeff Tranter] has done a number of retrocomputing projects. But he wanted to tackle something more substantial. So he set out to build a 68000-based single board computer called the TS2 that he found in a textbook. He’s documented it in a series of blog posts (about 30 posts, by our count) and a video that you can see below.
The 68000 had a very rational architecture for its day. A flat memory space was refreshing compared to other similar processors, and the asynchronous bus made hardware design easier, too. While most CPUs of the era assumed bus devices could perform their service in a fixed amount of time, the 68000 used a handshake with devices to allow them to take the time they needed. Most other CPUs had to provide a mechanism for a slow device to stall the bus which was complicated and, in many cases, less efficient.
