BYTEC/16

Works like a charm 8

May

8

2015

As announced last time, I powered up the CPU. In all honesty, I was expecting to see a blank screen and was prepared to spend some quality debugging time in front of a scope and logic analyzer, but was positively surprised to see that the CPU worked on the very first attempt. I even let ...

CPU assembly completed 2

Apr

25

2015

This is what an assembled stack of seven CPU boards looks like. I was able to complete the soldering work recently, and now have a complete CPU and a bunch of peripherals on printed circuit boards. Farewell, old wire-wrapped CPU prototype! The new CPU is way more robust than the delicate wire mesh. It is ...

Got CPU boards

Feb

22

2015

Time to break out the soldering iron again! CPU boards arrived in mail a few days back. That’s seven euro-sized boards, each one individually sealed in plastic, with green solder mask (anything else would mean extra manufacturing cost) and without silk screen layer (again, just to save a few bucks). At current prices of PCB ...

CPU boards 2

Dec

6

2014

I finally managed to complete the PCB design for the CPU core. New schematics and Eagle files are available for download here. It was not an easy task and it took few months of work in short weekend bursts. The finished CPU layout consists of seven euro-boards (100x160mm), all manually routed, with 16 mils track ...

Relocatable objects 2

Dec

16

2013

Important software update today. I have updated my compiler toolchain to support relocatable objects. Even though today’s version does not bring many improvements in code generation, I consider it very important and getting me much closer to my goal of running “real software” on BYTEC/16. Until now, I only had a retargeted LCC compiler, which ...

Function pointers in C

Oct

31

2013

Some time ago I ran a stress test of my compiler toolchain by compiling portions of Minix C library (compilation only, with no intention of running the code). This was to see if I encounter any problems. Overall I am happy with the results. I fixed several LCC machine description bugs, and I am now ...