On ROM v5a
Posted: 07 May 2020, 07:58
Those following my GitHub activity may have noted this:
No activity in recent weeks and some work yesterday to freeze a ROM version 5a.
This all has to do with my declining health situation, some of you are aware of already. Health problems that started one year ago recently escalated pretty badly as surgery and several immunotherapies proved ineffective. Long story short, reality is that I won't be able to complete another Gigatron ROM release anymore. At least not to the same standards as all earlier official ROM releases.
But since ROM v4 a lot of new work has already accumulated in dev.rom: dev.rom is currently more than halfway towards what would become a true ROM v5 release. It is kind of feature complete but with loose ends, obvious bugs and untested parts. (For example memory detection is broken.) As we don't foresee ROM v5 ever getting completed, we decided to make a snapshot from dev.rom now and call that "ROM v5a". It has MS BASIC, Apple-1 emulation, the new vCPU instructions and a fresh Easter Egg: good for computer shows. ROM v5a can't and won't become part of kits, it's too immature. For example it can't boot from an SD card due to a silly mistake (but dev.rom still can boot, you just have to build it yourself). The kits still ship with stable ROM v4. If you want to run v5a, you have to grab the image from GitHub and burn it yourself.
This is just to make an image available, freeze it and give it a name. With that its new features could be officially included in interface.json. We gave it a proper new RomTypeValue so you can safely write compatible programs against it.
No activity in recent weeks and some work yesterday to freeze a ROM version 5a.
This all has to do with my declining health situation, some of you are aware of already. Health problems that started one year ago recently escalated pretty badly as surgery and several immunotherapies proved ineffective. Long story short, reality is that I won't be able to complete another Gigatron ROM release anymore. At least not to the same standards as all earlier official ROM releases.
But since ROM v4 a lot of new work has already accumulated in dev.rom: dev.rom is currently more than halfway towards what would become a true ROM v5 release. It is kind of feature complete but with loose ends, obvious bugs and untested parts. (For example memory detection is broken.) As we don't foresee ROM v5 ever getting completed, we decided to make a snapshot from dev.rom now and call that "ROM v5a". It has MS BASIC, Apple-1 emulation, the new vCPU instructions and a fresh Easter Egg: good for computer shows. ROM v5a can't and won't become part of kits, it's too immature. For example it can't boot from an SD card due to a silly mistake (but dev.rom still can boot, you just have to build it yourself). The kits still ship with stable ROM v4. If you want to run v5a, you have to grab the image from GitHub and burn it yourself.
This is just to make an image available, freeze it and give it a name. With that its new features could be officially included in interface.json. We gave it a proper new RomTypeValue so you can safely write compatible programs against it.