The software to be included with the kit release later this month is nearly done. Just in time as we're now also waiting for the last parts shipment to arrive, expected in two weeks. When those are good we know if we can meet our target selling price and will announce it to those interested on the mailing list. All other parts are in house already, manuals printed, packaging ready and beta tests successfully completed. Our living rooms look like a warehouse now.

Of course the kit will ship with some demo applications built-in. My focus is for a part still on those, but equally important is that the programming core is stable and tested. For me it is crucial that the memory map is well-defined and the 16-bit interpreter is fully tested and useful. After all, the vCPU opcodes are jump offsets, so it will be impossible to fix any of that later while maintaining compatibility as well. Last week I found I had some unused space in the interpreter code page, so I added some new bit-wise logic instructions and support stack variables. Surprisingly, none of the applications I wrote so far needed those.

To test, I ported my old n-Queens solver. It exercises bitwise logic and recursion, so it is a good test for these new instructions. On the screenshot above you can see it gets the correct answers for the sequence.  The solver uses 5 stack variables. That, plus one for the the return address, gives 12 bytes per invocation. With the stack living in the top half of the zero page, this means we can go 10 levels deep. The solver needs less than a minute to compute the list, or at about 850 recursions per second. [Edit: I just figured that it should be easy to go down to using 4 variables or 10 bytes, and with that up to 12 levels deep.]

Although 8-bit assembly programs must be programmed in the EPROM, interpreted programs run from RAM. The built-in applications are of course stored in ROM also, but they are loaded into RAM first, so they use the ROM merely as a disk. Interpreted programs can also be loaded into RAM directly over the input port, and this is how you can program the Gigatron without using an EPROM eraser and programmer. For this I hook up the input port pins, that normally go to the game controller, to a simple Arduino. The Arduino can send data at the same rate as the horizontal sync. With some checksumming overhead, this boils down to exactly 28k8 payload bits per second. Much faster than loading C64 programs from tape back in the day... (3000 baud with speed loaders!)

The loader was the last part of the software that needed debugging with a scope.