Here is a somewhat dumb example of the kind of thing one can do with Stierlitz. Let’s say that you have some memory-mapped I/O ports in your system architecture, which you would like to test without having a working CPU design of any kind loaded into your FPGA. The Xilinx ML501 board includes a Tianma-TM162, […]
Rumor has it that a well-known industrial giant will soon attempt to bring head-mounted displays back into fashion. One ought to remember that, for a number of reasons, they were never really “in” fashion to begin with. To my knowledge, every single one ever marketed fell into one of the following categories: Military toy, priced […]
The tool described in this post may be helpful to other ab initio machine-architecture developers. If any exist. The rest of Loper will remain in my private code repository, because it is not a collaborative project. Meet Stierlitz [1], perhaps the world’s strangest bus analyzer. For basic use, it requires no software at all on […]
Progress has been slow, because I have been otherwise occupied for quite some time. Slow, but not entirely still. Since turning Loper OS into an ab initio CPU architecture project, I have been using Xilinx development boards for prototyping. For the past year — an ML-501. The FPGA toolchain itself is (grudgingly) Linux-friendly, but those […]
Computer users are forever being misled, successfully lied to, sold “old wine in new bottles,” bamboozled in a myriad ways large and small. Why? Simply because we are, to use the technical term, suckers. Not always as individuals, but certainly collectively. The defining attribute of the sucker is, of course, an inability to learn from […]
Better screen shots from other people: Ralf Moeller Rainer Joswig
Behold: “The rolling element is a sphere a foot or so across, the upper part of which fits into a cage equipped with motors and drive-wheels. The rider sits on a saddle projecting up from this framework. Should he begin to topple, accelerometers detect the movement instantly, and the onboard microprocessor commands the motors to […]
As a child, I was quite fond of old-fashioned Lego bricks. One very endearing but rarely discussed property of such bricks is their durability, bordering on the indestructible. Almost any abuse inflicted on a Lego structure will, at worst, leave you with a pile of bricks entirely like the one you started with. Even the most […]
The Nook, Barnes & Noble’s answer to Amazon’s Kindle, was greeted with fanfare for including a feature which allows users to “lend” a purchased book to anyone, with a guarantee of recovering it later. The first announcement I came across mentioned no other rules governing the lending process. My first thought was that such an […]
Let’s take another look at the console. There are several boards inside, but this is the only one which deals in custom Symbolics protocols (as opposed to the widely-known intricacies of operating a black-and-white CRT.) The rough annotations are my own. Click on the pictures for super-size (~10MB!) images. Once again, the Phase Encoded Video […]
