So far the Domesday86 project has delivered two projects BeebSCSI (a complete SCSI emulation system for 8-bit Acorn computers) and SmallyMouse2 (a mouse/trackball emulation system for many 8 and 16-bit retro micros). Due to the open-source/open-hardware approach of the project all design, software, hardware and documentation has been made freely available. Several people have taken the designs and started distributing boards to retro enthusiasts independently of the project (which has been positively encouraged by the Domesday86 team). While these sub-projects have proven useful early on, in order to progress towards our goal of complete Acorn Domesday emulation there is still a way to go.
Currently work is progressing on the technology required to back up the Acorn AIV laserdiscs; not just for emulation use, but also to allow the Laserdiscs to be recreated in the future. This means very exact copies are required and the only way to achieve this accuracy is to directly sample the laserdisc contents from the laser output on-board a laserdisc player. This process is complex, requiring some 27 million samples/sec at >9 bit ADC resolution (we are hoping for 11-bit resolution eventually). The shear amount of data collected means a combination of FPGAs and microcontrollers are required simply to handle the massive amount of data being generated in real time.
Of course, as well as time, this requires an increasing investment in equipment. So far the project has received two monetary donations, one equipment donation, a donation of documentation and one gift of an additional domain name. However, the project does not receive any remuneration from 3rd parties selling BeebSCSI or SmallyMouse2 boards. If you have paid for one of these boards please also consider leaving a donation to the project big or small - your payment for the board is only to the 3rd party and does not provide any assistance to the team that put hundreds of development hours into the design... Only your donations help us to continue developing the Domesday86 project as an open-source, open-hardware project!