Robert Butler @roberttheiv@mastodon.social
I’m a programmer turned homebrew computer maker.
Joined Mar 2020
Pinned toot
I’m designing and building 16-bit homebrew computers from the instruction set to the desktop. The most fun you will ever have with a computer is the one you built yourself. GrokThis on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCh4OpfF7T7UtezGejRTLxCw
Robert Butler
boosted
Am I the only one who possesses really old hardware, yet don't dare to plug it in anymore, because I'm afraid I might be really disappointed by finding out it's now broken?
Schrödinger's Retro Computers...
Robert Butler
boosted
@theruran @thegibson when you think about it, the reason that www came to dominate the internet may have been as simple as the fact that it became a much easier way to distribute and update applications, which has little to do with what the web was designed for.
In the end, it’s the browser-as-terminal that allowed us to give-up the freedom of personal computers for the convenience of the mainframe known as “the cloud”.
Time to take the power back.
Robert Butler
boosted
i need to get a t-shirt that says "i should've started this process in a tmux"
Robert Butler
boosted
It's interesting to think that jurrasic park was made on a computer that probably isn't powerful enough to watch jurrasic park on youtube
In the process of writing this code and recording the video I have proven that MicroCISC is at least useable for homebrew computing, which I must say is gratifying after all the work I put in.
My video on MicroCISC assembly went live this morning. I walk through all of the key aspects of programming in MicroCISC and end with an animated image sliding across a 128x72 pixel virtual display.
It Works! Introducing Homebrew Assembly Language! https://youtu.be/Hj8gz2ZeNb0
I have a video dropping in a few hours introducing my homebrew assembly language, MicroCISC. I had no end to recording issues, sound issues and other challenges on this one. Definitely a labor of love and I think it turned out well despite all of that.
And here is the "compute" instruction: https://github.com/grokthis/thinking-ucisc/blob/trunk/01_Calculator/03_Compute_That.md
My attempt at introducing a brand new programmer to the copy instruction on Micro-CISC assuming as little as possible: https://github.com/grokthis/thinking-ucisc/blob/trunk/01_Calculator/02_Copy_That.md
Today I’m finishing up a script and recording a video introducing assembly programming in Micro-CISC. I decided I need to assume as little prior programming experience as possible on the part of the viewer. If I can introduce someone to programming for the first time one of my main goals for my homebrew computer will have been achieved.
Video went live today about installing the uCISC assembly dev environment.
I’m designing and building 16-bit homebrew computers from the instruction set to the desktop. The most fun you will ever have with a computer is the one you built yourself. GrokThis on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCh4OpfF7T7UtezGejRTLxCw
Robert Butler
boosted
Why Mastodon and the fediverse are “doomed to fail”:
https://write.as/eloquence/why-mastodon-and-the-fediverse-are-doomed-to-fail
If you think about it, 90% of what computers do is conditionally copy data. It’s primarily about what data and where.
Opening video on my YouTube channel to see if I can make my own Commodore 64 inspired homebrew computer based on uCISC, my custom 16-bit CPU instruction set architecture.
Robert Butler
boosted
*Update on the Mu computer's memory-safe language*
Since the language is starting to seem stable, and the error messages have been getting better, and I managed to build some little programs without _too_ much trouble, I figured it was time to start actually _talking_ about the Mu language in the documentation. So make way SubX, and yield center-stage to Mu.
https://github.com/akkartik/mu/blob/master/README.md#toolchain
Robert Butler
boosted
I spent the last few days implementing a 'byte' type in Mu.
For the most part, Mu is exclusively 32-bit. No long/short nonsense here. However, I do like strings. Eventually even UTF-8 strings. So, minimal byte support. Mostly they behave like 32-bit values. You can't store them on the stack. (Because x86 reasons.)
As a test, I built a little calculator app: http://akkartik.github.io/mu/html/apps/arith.mu.html. This app also shows off multiple return values.
Read more: https://github.com/akkartik/mu
cc @s_ol
16-bit processor with 2 instructions (copy and ALU) and a set of common behaviors between them (e.g. source, destination, conditional, etc). Set that on top of a carefully designed processor spec and you can scale from 1 core to unlimited on easy to implement cores, securely, with unlimited potential addressable memory, support for super scaling ops at the programmers control in a simple to understand (I hope) package. https://github.com/grokthis/ucisc/blob/master/docs/01_Introduction.md - Could be amazing or a dead end... we will see
Well, I did it. I finished my 16-bit ISA last night. I took simplicity as far as I could. No preemptive multitasking or interrupts, designed for multi-core programming for unlimited core counts, unbounded addressable memory, no privileged processor modes, design for security isolation, supports task isolation by default. Initial single core is < 3k LUTs in the FPGA with most functionality implemented.
2 basic instructions: copy and ALU instructions. That is all. Docs soon, VM updates to follow.
I mean, since getting my mechanical keyboard and getting up to speed on it, the input lag is big enough I occasionally type the wrong thing at the wrong time in vim because it still hasn’t shown a character in the buffer. I was still unprepared for how big a difference it made on this hardware. And fairly shocked by the 14% difference on a compute bound task.
I’m a programmer turned homebrew computer maker.
Joined Mar 2020
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