Some progress, but still a long time.  Life gets in the way!

I have concluded that minicom is unable to deal with the serial stream from the PDP8e.  If I start the focal interpreter, I get decent results.  Minicom is usable with FOCAL at 115200 baud.  However when I boot OS8, minicom displays garbage.  None of the commands that I have tried produce sane results.  At the end of the display I get the "." prompt of OS8 so OS8 is still running correctly.  Doug Ingram's csd works fine.  I will not try to figure out why minicom does not work properly.

I no longer am getting random jumps and halts!  The "disk" remains ready!

I have re-written the tx and rx parts of the serial package.  This was because  I was having OS8 miss characters and sit there waiting on a character.

I have discovered that I have an Altera Max10 FPGA board. I tried re-targetting my code to the Max10 with Altera's tools.  They don't like some of the verilog system tasks that make calculating register bit widths easy.  I will have to hand calculate and then hard code the constants.  I have taken the bulk of the timing related calculations and put them in the same directory as the top level file for the FPGA.  I have that file for the ICE40 HX8K.  I will now try to do the same thing for the max10.