Gigatron Hackers

Just some things that caught my attention just because I remember them differently (my memories are worthless, so don't worry): The bricks don't stay at their position when rotating repeatedly. They start to travel right to left. Dropping a brick is slow. I expected them to fall quickly once telling...

I expect you need different resistors for R3 (single resister) and R8 (array of four). The red LEDs in the kit are 2mA/1.8V and are protected by 2.2kΩ series resistors.

Works for me! I've also sped up the USB loader by bumping up the baud rate and removing some stupidity. It now takes 12.5 seconds to send a reset, start the loader, push Gigatris.gt1 into the board and start execution. Today my 10.1 inch LCD monitor arrived from Amazon. It goes well with one of the ...

The call to ClearRect places the return address into vLR, and later on 'ret' looks at vLR to know where to go back to. There is no stack at work at all there yet. But you need one once you have more than one level, because otherwise the inner call will clobber the return address of the outer call. S...

The commits you see are all in the tooling part, keeping the ROM itself unchanged (for now). We're step by step making it more understandable and usable than just for us. We're still at ROM v1 now for the kits. After Belgrade we plan a tiny update: make Snake suitable for colour blinded people (such...

What's the catch? You borrowed an instruction from the sound generation that it wants back :-) The wiped out instruction helps with creating different harmonics, duty cycle etc: the 'wavA' channel modifier. Maybe also needed for making better noise waveforms (although 'wavX' could be enough for tha...

I'm glad we didn't optimise away the two '157 multiplexers in the high address unit. At one point we did consider to put '08 quad AND gates there instead, but we felt that would destroy too much tweaking potential. (We were also a bit afraid of the higher fan-out on boards with bipolar transistors. ...

Core/compilegcl.py now injects this patch into the GT1 files it creates. I generated a couple of them, and they work fine. I checked them into GitHub as well for now. marcelk@mbook-3:~/Projects/Gigatron-1/Design/theloop> Core/compilegcl.py Apps/HelloWorld.gcl theloop.sym Compiling file Apps/HelloWor...

After loading the start address into vLR, can't you just RET? Yes :D 0x5b, 0x86, 0x06, // Patch segment, 6 bytes at $5b86 0x11, 0x00, 0x02, // LDWI $0200 0x2b, 0x1a, // STW vLR 0xff, // RET 0x00, 0x5b, 0x86, // Execute: run patch first What if the loader writes the start address minus 2 and the sta...

Having played the game now (it looks FANTASTIC), some thoughts. Perhaps not immediately applicable for this program, but it can give ideas on using the limited resources of the system in other projects: 1. The tetrominoes keep flickering when they aren't falling to the next position. You can reduce ...