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• TD4 DevKit Reorganisation Log

  Alexander Nekhaev • 05/06/2020 at 08:36 • 0 comments

  Done:

  • Assembler
  • Disassembler
  • Emulator
  • stdlib
  • stdpextlib
  • "New project" script

  In development:
  

  • Preprocessor

• We are stil alive!

  Alexander Nekhaev • 04/14/2020 at 23:26 • 1 comment

   Hi everyone! We have been absent for a while, but it doesn’t mean we haven’t been working on our project. Due to several reasons our engineer Fedor will return to his work on ardware in late October and I am still working on software. Right now I work on SDK improvements. In several weeks git repository will be updated and the Development Kit program will be divided into several independent ones:

  • Preprocessor
  • Assembler
  • Disassembler
  • Emulator

  Next, standard library of assembler macros will be reorganized and partially rewritten. Also we are working on tiny OS for loading programs on two-core machines from external device. Unfortunately we refuse our .NET Assembler v3.0 and new SDK is further development of C-based assembler.

  Some new utilities will be added.

  Next step for software part is programming languages support. First of all C and Go compilers (looks like Go compiler will appear earlier). Talking about C compiler I mean LLVM back-end for TD4. Go compiler will be based on SSA library.

  In Assembler v3.0 we introduced TD4E8 device without explanations. The difference between TD4 and TD4E8 is length of Imm which is 1 byte in new core. It means that amount of RAM now can be enlarged up to 8192 bytes.

  Several ideas about future improvements:

  • Improved emulator with modeling different machine configurations.
  • SystemVerilog machine generator.

  That’s all for now. Stay tuned and stay healty.

• Assembler 3.0

  Alexander Nekhaev • 08/25/2019 at 10:28 • 0 comments

  Assembler 3.0 is mostly ready but some bugs still present. May be downloaded from repo. Attention: this version is written in C# so you will need .NET 4.7. It's available both on Windows, macOS and Linux.

• SystemVerilog sources added

  Alexander Nekhaev • 06/15/2019 at 12:58 • 0 comments

  SystemVerilog source code of vanilla TD4 is now available on GitHub in main repo.

• Early core scheme

  Alexander Nekhaev • 03/05/2019 at 23:24 • 0 comments

  TD4+ Core early version render (from KiCad).

• Now in Minecraft!

  Alexander Nekhaev • 02/01/2019 at 00:02 • 0 comments

  Test program:

  ;;Standart test for TD4: output all numbers from 0 to 15
  inc:
  mov b, a
  out b
  mov a, b +1
  jncl inc
  hlt

• Finally, an update!

  Fedor Gruzdev • 10/18/2018 at 09:15 • 0 comments

  After almost 2 weeks since projects' creation it's time to write a log, isn't it? I've got a few things to post.

  First, now there's a link to Github repo with some code written by my friend with whom we started this. As he is more about software than hardware, he writes "SDK" (if you can call it this).  For now, there are assembler/disassembler and emulator. This is enough to start writing programs (although you can do this using nothing but a sheet of paper but still).

  Second, I finally assembed ROM PCB!

  It's wired point-to-point using enameled wire. I saw this technique here on HaD (by the way, I hihgly reccomend visiting Elm's site, elm-chan.org, there's a lot of great stuff over there (check out the pictures!)). That's a time-consuming process, but the results look very nice (do they?). I've also made it swappable, so it's possible to develop program using this PCB and than make a smaller hard-wired diode-only version (true firmware BTW).

  Next thing to do is to start assembling the main board, and the first part will be, of course, the IC9 replacement, discrete-logic ful adder!
  

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