Posted by zdw 4 days ago
I also had some fun modelling the chips in verilog and model checking a verilog interpreter against them. https://www.philipzucker.com/td4_ebmc/ George Rennie got a similar thing working using the yosys toolchain https://github.com/georgerennie/philip_zucker_sby_demo
I'm not sure of the legal ramifications of this but if anyone shows me their original PDF receipt from the Japanese publisher's website I'd be willing to share it under the conditions you don't publish or share it anywhere publicly...
Plus just a tiny bit of logic that wires in "Carry Flag" when Src=Zero to control Dst=PC
I guess "MOV A,B" sets Imm to zero for simplicity, because I don't see anything stopping it
Ok now I cheated and had Claude translate the entire book into English. It even translated the manga images with hand written hiragana/katana in speech bubbles (using comic sans) plus all the diagrams!
I decided to not take on too much in one go, so having the English text takes a lot of variables out of the equation for me since my Japanese is very rusty after not using it for 20 years..
Back in 1983 or so, I had a TI/99 computer and found a BASIC program called "PicoProcessor" in one of the home computing magazines. It emulated a 4-bit microprocessor. It only had a handful of instructions, 16 bytes of memory, and a couple of registers but it was enough to illustrate the concepts of how a processor runs machine code, in a way that was much more understandable than just reading about it.
Could I write any useful programs with it? No. But could I see how a CPU adds two numbers? Yes. And that was enough of an introduction that assembly language was suddenly not so mysterious.
Last time I tried I ended up getting sidetracked by making a tool to help me. https://fingswotidun.com/PerfBoard/
But at least that's made the job of building a nice compact ALU module much easier. (One of the test boards in the app shows it)