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From: "Ben A L Jemmett" <bal.jemmett@ukonline.co.uk>
Subject: Re: [ANNOUNCE] ZOS v1.00
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References: <2934ffe3.0204190541.3468e119@posting.google.com>    <tu19aa.6d.ln@172.16.100.88> <Gv6J0E.CoJ@bath.ac.uk>    <296jaa.qju.ln@172.16.100.88> <GvDo00.uM@bath.ac.uk> <c3hoaa.nlm.ln@172.16.100.88>
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Date: Thu, 2 May 2002 10:34:21 GMT
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"David Given" <dg@pearl.tao.co.uk> wrote in message
news:c3hoaa.nlm.ln@172.16.100.88...
> [tkGate]
>
> My god! It's playing _Animals_ on a simulated processor running at the
gate level!
> This is *so* cool!

When I saw that, I was sitting in front of an Ultra 5 for several minutes
going 'but but but but but'.  It's a neat piece of software.  At least, 1.6i
is -- 1.6h had bugs moving wires about, which lost me hours and hours of
work (the data would be corrupt long before it crashed, so your savefiles
were dead too).

Oh, if 1.6i is the latest and has a bug with the errors list (if you create
a buggy circuit, nothing shows up in the error dialog that appears), I
patched that.

> Well, the ucode programming interface is well-defined, although the
processors
> themselves only accept encrypted authorised updates.

Aww, geez, that's no fun.  The processor itself is probably slightly
overkill, though :)

> Possibly the PERQ would be a better choice... (or designing our own. Good
grief,
> tkgate even has tools for designing your own microcode.)

Yep, but I haven't used them (flicked through the docs briefly and wrote my
own on a sheet of A4).  The processor I've built was only a small thing
(something like 12 opcodes, 32-bit instruction words), nothing too
interesting.

--
Regards,
Ben A L Jemmett.
(http://web.ukonline.co.uk/ben.jemmett/, http://www.deltasoft.com/)


