Gigatron Hackers

Didn't the eevBlog have red ones for the four-layer ones?

Given I'm a Ruby developer, I've taken a bunch of inspiration from the existing vASM assembler written in Python and gone about learning the architecture and instruction set. It's been super fun! I'm a Python guy, but I must say that I think your vASM as a Ruby embedded DSL looks really nice - very...

[Partly replying just to keep conversations going on this forum] I'd been wondering if a good use for the vBlank interrupt would be to implement a keyboard buffer for programs like BASIC. Perhaps using a small ring buffer, of say 32 characters, or less. I think it would be easy for slow programs to ...

Thank you for letting us know Walter, and I'm so sorry for your loss. You said that you hoped that his brilliance and optimism has inspired others; they certainly inspired me! I've learned a huge amount in a short time from my journey with the Gigatron, and in particular from Marcel's code. But just...

Yes, that all makes perfect sense. I'm continuing to learn a lot from the Gigatron - especially about what is and isn't easy!

I'd like to see Forth become a viable alternative to C for writing larger programs on the Gigatron - but C on vCPU, will likely prove to work better in practice.

Here are a few strands of thought on virtual machine design. I don't know if they add up to anything - but if you were to design a new language with the Gigatron in mind, choosing an appropriate execution model seems half the battle. I'm increasingly wondering if Forth isn't such a great fit for the...

Hi Paul For nomal execution, the compiled Forth words are lists of 16-bit addresses, so you would load the X and Y regs and do an absolute jump I assume. For better or worse, I've managed to make it quite a bit more complicated than that :) As it's off the stated topic of this thread, I've started a...

For nomal execution, the compiled Forth words are lists of 16-bit addresses That sounds nice, but unfortunately it doesn't work like this in my Forth; we can't really have pointers in ROM. Because of the Gigatron Harvard architecture we can't treat the ROM like RAM and read arbitrary bytes - this i...

The issue I had was trying to do label arithmetic in a position independent way - e.g. the sort of thing I was talking about further up the thread. The motivation was a bit hard to explain (it's to do with how I do branching within Forth threads), but I needed to emit ld instructions with the operan...

Congratulations on the success over two years, and thank you very much for open-sourcing the schematics.