Re: [f-cpu] Status quo

[whygee@xxxxxxxxx]

Le 2015-03-27 09:48, Ralf Jonas a ÃcritÂ:
> Hi Yann,
Hi !

> > Before doing anything, I'm looking around
> > to see who is still here and who wants
> > to do what.
>
> That depends mostly on where the road leads to.

Right.
It's not very clear yet, and I've been wondering for a while...
But we have time, don't we ?

> I must admit, I nearly forgot everything about the f-cpu so I just
> read the manual 0.27 describing the f-cpu.
I understand.

After so many years, there are good or great things,
and details that I'd want to change. So I'm considering a
"clean reboot", it could be considered a fork it the project
was still active :-D keeping what works (certain central features
are still nice to me) while progressively updating stuffs that
don't look good after the past decade. The world of CPUs
has evolved so radically !

> Please help us: Where are we now and what are the next milestones?
For now, I'm only considering cleaning up the various websites
(our seul.org resources have been closed after the server got hacked)
and the mailing list's address book so we can restart with as little
effort as possible when everything "feels good".

While playing with the YASEP, I've found that its "integrated design"
approach works well (it speeds up design iterations) and I hope to
bring this to the F-CPU camp. However before it is possible,
there is a LOT of code refactoring and rewrite to do on my side.

But when it's done, it would take only a few months to transfer the
documentation/manual to the new interactive system, and people could
start to play with a few toys i've already coded...
Progress on http://ygwm.org is high on my priority list for this reason.

> Has there ever been an existing prototype board of the f-cpu e.g. a
> Xilinx development board or something like that?
Not even.
emulation was not great, no good compiler support,
no complete VHDL source code... GHDL didn't even exist !

People work differently now, too.

> I'm a programmer for over thirty years and one of my hobbies is
> porting operating systems to some very strange cpus. Currently I'm
> porting FORTH onto a cpu which a friend of mine designs. It's a kind
> of 68020 with an integrated DSP for a new kind of effect processing
> device. FORTH is a stack oriented language and so I'm annoying him
> constantly with wishes for more stack oriented machine commands :-)
DSP with FORTH... why not ;-)

> So I don't know if I can really help designing the cpu, but I'm sure I
> can help adding some comments concerning the instruction set.

Sure, even simply testing what others do is very important.
Many designs are "in the void" because somebody wrote something,
but there is nobody to use it or even confirm it works for them...

For now, I have many scattered projects and they slowly coalesce.
I have developed "toy projects" and parts of them get spun off,
depending on practical needs. For example, I am currently releasing
this small board http://ygdes.com/WizYasep/index_en.html
and along with other projects like http://yasep.org I hope it will
evolve into a part of the development/emulation/prototyping toolset
for FC0 and others.

> Ralf
YG
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