Final Design Tweaks?
I’m trying to finish up the final hardware design now, so I can get started with actually building this thing. Although it will probably never be truly “done”, I don’t want to end up ripping out half the components and…
Steve
Protoboardin’
My long-awaited delivery of hardware arrived yesterday, including a protoboard, tools, and about half the components I need to build the machine. I’m using the protoboard to try various test circuits, before I construct the real thing on the wire…
Max Clock Speed
I used Verilog to do a simple test to estimate the machine’s top clock speed. I kept increasing the clock rate until the validation test suite started failing, and it topped out at about 2.63MHz. That feels respectable for a…
Microcode 1.0 Complete
Time to celebrate! I powered through the remainder of the microcode for the core machine instructions, along with a full test suite to verify each instruction, and it all works. That’s 50 different instructions, and a couple of hundred individual…
ADC $NNNN,X
Uh oh. I was cranking through the microcode implementation for BMOW’s instruction set, making good progress. I’d finished about two-thirds of the microcode, when I came to ADC absolute, X-indexed. That’s when the wheels came off the cart. This instruction…
Optimization, or Distraction?
I think I may be getting too concerned about potential optimizations to the hardware design, before I’ve even built or simulated the initial design. A couple of possible optimizations occurred to me recently. Improved CC Register: I described earlier how…
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