Very nice. The parts that usually fail are the HD or the PSU in old kit, most of the rest of it should basically last forever, so long as you can craft replacements from modern components, you'll still be running that old box in 50 years.
One of my on-hold projects is an FPGA-based floppy controller (that is, my own version of the 8272). I wanted to make an FPGA-based computer that could talk to a real floppy drive. The interesting point is to make the MFM data encoder/decoder plus DPLL for clock recovery.
I got as far as 3.3v to 5.v interface logic, plus acquired logic analyzer traces of real floppy data patterns.
Due to the speed limitation of the Serial interface, I wonder if you could run the 3com card with low enough resources to do the emulation. Not real networking, I am thinking more of embedding requests into raw ethernet packets with a direct ethernet link to a Raspberry Pi, and some stuff on the RPi?
Alternatively the Printer port supported 8bit parallel transfers are was much much faster. Potentially a USB -> Parallel interface on the Pi. I remember using a Parallel to Parallel cable between 2 486s with the lap link software and getting MUCH faster then serial connection.
Also, it's pretty easy to make a wire-wrapped ISA-bus card.. I would try to do this. One 22v8 GAL for the address decoder :-) I would make a some kind of FIFO interface- don't bother with DMA, it's very slow.
The microcontroller that is in the disk-emulating hardware I use to keep my Oric-1 collection running, is faster/better/stronger than the CPU in the Oric itself.
In that regard, Oric recently caught up with the C64. ;)
