Back from the Dead
It’s been a month since my last update, but BMOW and I are back from the dead, and better than ever. I even have some progress to report with MSBASIC! That’s pretty crazy when you consider that BMOW and I…
Microsoft BASIC
A picture tells the story here: It’s BASIC! And not just any BASIC– it’s the venerable Microsoft BASIC that I remember fondly from the Apple II, Commodore 64, and other machines of that era. The version shown here is a…
Happy Birthday BMOW!
Yesterday was the 1 year anniversary of the first BMOW journal entry, which described the CPU architecture design that I’d worked out on paper. The planning phase grew from there, and lasted several months. The first wires in what would…
BASIC?
I’ve started looking at getting BASIC working on the machine. At first I thought I might need to reverse engineer an existing 8-bit BASIC from the ROM image, or write my own, but then I found something much better. These…
Microchess Video Support
Microchess for BMOW is now a full-fledged graphical program, instead of a text-mode program using ASCII art for the board. It was pretty easy to do, fortunately. I wrote a stand-alone routine to draw the board graphics using the existing…
Simulator Download
I’ve beefed up the BMOW simulator in a major way, and it’s starting to look pretty good! For the curious, you can grab the latest simulator here, and give it a try yourself. I’ve bundled it with the Microchess program…
Microchess
Holy cow, BMOW runs actual software! In this case it’s Microchess, a 1 kilobyte marvel from 1976. Here it is, showing the first few moves of the Giuco Piano opening: The two-letter code for each piece indicates the color and…
Everything But The Kitchen VSYNC
I’ve decided to do whatever it takes to fix the VSYNC problem with BMOW’s video, and right now it looks like that means ripping out and redesigning a decent portion of the video address circuitry. Things are fine when displaying…
Debugging
Holy cow, this thing is riddled with bugs! I started trying to address some of the bugs described in the Boot Logo posting, with mostly positive results. Some problems turned out to be hardware issues, some were in the software,…
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