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
One of the problems I’m having with the advent of code on uCISC is that I can’t run it on my real processor. The input text is larger than the 8k of memory I have on the FPGA. I might have to break out my larger FPGA and see if I can get uCISC running on it with a full 64k. Running on real hardware is better 😁
#adventofcode in Mu
Day 3 solutions (spoiler alert):
http://akkartik.github.io/mu/html/apps/advent2020/3b.mu.html
60 minutes. Lost 11 minutes debugging a silly mistake (see commit log)
No new Mu bugs found, no machine-code hacking was needed.
Project page: https://github.com/akkartik/mu
Advent of code in uCISC: Day 3 - https://github.com/grokthis/ucisc/blob/master/examples/aoc/2020/day_3.ucisc
25 minutes for part 1 and 5 minutes to run for part 2. Had all the standard libs I needed this time around unlike day 1 and 2.
*Advent of code in Mu*
Day 2 solutions (spoiler alert):
http://akkartik.github.io/mu/html/apps/advent2020/2a.mu.html
http://akkartik.github.io/mu/html/apps/advent2020/2b.mu.html
40 minutes. No new Mu bugs found, no machine-code hacking was needed.
Project page: https://github.com/akkartik/mu
Well... composing that inspired me with an idea. Found the issue and just correctly calculated fib(24) at 8 MHz on uCISC hardware.
@s_ol @roberttheiv I just remembered to do something overdue: add your projects to Mu's list of forks:
https://github.com/akkartik/mu#forks
Let me know if you'd like any changes to the blurbs or your credits!
The Mu shell, compiling down to a subset of 32-bit x86 machine code, then to a Linux ELF binary, packaged up with just a Linux kernel and nothing else, running on a Linux console emulated on Qemu, on a Thinkpad T420s running 64-bit Linux.
Just another 27 million lines of C to take out (Linux kernel), and I'll have a decent computing stack.
*Screenception*
Visualizing programs with side-effects in a postfix shell with a live-updating text-mode environment. Built all the way up from machine code without any dependencies (except an x86 processor and Linux kernel).
https://archive.org/details/akkartik-2min-2020-11-12
Project page: https://github.com/akkartik/mu
More context: https://mastodon.social/@akkartik/104896128141863951
Just checking the health of the microcontroller. The speed is 9600, I did not come across this fact in the instructions for the firmware :)
You can’t tell from the photo, but this is a knight rider like animation on the blue and yellow LEDs. The red LEDs are the program counter (of little use at full speed).
@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.
I’m a programmer turned homebrew computer maker.