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thejpster / monotron

A simple 8-bit home computer style application for the TI Tiva-C Launchpad
Apache License 2.0
191 stars 9 forks source link

Other instruction sets #39

Open thejpster opened 5 years ago

thejpster commented 5 years ago

CPU emulators take up some code space, why don't we pack a whole bunch into the ROM, allowing the user to upload code for any of them:

This means applications loaded into RAM can be smaller, and pure target machinecode without bundling an assembler. We would need some sort of linker script though, do determine which regions of the 24 KiB application RAM are mapped to which regions of 64 KiB 8-bit address space, and also to standardise where the emulated peripherals (screen, input, serial, etc) appear in 8-bit address space. You'd also need an 8-bit monitor.

thejpster commented 5 years ago

Turns out MS-DOS needs a minimum of 32 KiB of RAM to boot from floppy, so x86 isn't worth it :(

thejpster commented 5 years ago

CP/M has a minimum of 16 KiB. Then I could run Wordstar and Turbo Pascal :)

Edit: OK, maybe not Turbo Pascal. That needs 64 KiB.