I have been busy trying to get the Ersatz-11 emulator to run on DR-DOS, which seems to work OK (more about that another time).  Then I decided to try getting the whole thing to boot from CD.  This would give me a PDP-11 Live CD.  Anyway, whilst having a rummage round in my pile of old junk hardware I found a motherboard given to me by my friend James.  It has 32Mb RAM on board and a 200MHz AMD K6 processor.  I don't have any IDE hard disks, but I do have an old CD drive.  So I started wondering if I could turn this lot into a PDP-11.  This is the machine on the bench:



So the next thing to do was to see if it boots, so I tried a linux CD I had lying around:



...which works a charm.  So the next thing was to try my PDP-11 live CD.  Guess what?  It only works:



This is sooo cool.  You can see I'm running my ASCII mandelbrot program in celebration.  In fact, this is so cool that I've gone and bought a brand new Intel D410PT motherboard and I intend to rig it to run as a PDP-11.  I expect that will fly.  I will use a solid state disk and have old software running on new hardware.  In the meantime this AMD K6 based prototype easily outperforms my real PDP-11/53.