Everyone and their granny has a ‘zero-parts’ EPROM, EEPROM or Flash programmer design. Well, I got mine. A Flash RAM programmer is going to be a necessity as the CFT project acquires speed, and I'd rather make my own tools than buy them at exorbitant prices.
This is a simple microcode assembler (or microassembler). It can be used to generate wide, horizontal microcode ROMs for relatively simple CPU architectures. Using a description of the microcode, it generates one or more ROM, EPROM, EEPROM, Flash et cetera images suitable for inclusing in a software emulator, a hardware device, or for use in a hardware description language such as Verilog or VHDL.
If you're building complex hardware devices like home-designed CPUs, this may come in handy! Prototyping home-designed CPUs isn't an easy task at all. One might say designing one is difficult, but let's assume you've already done that. State machines and function generation can be a nightmare to debug. Once you've found the bugs, actually fixing them may prove to be even more of a nightmare.
A project to design, document and build an instruction set, a processor and a Sixties-style minicomputer out of 74××× chips including common peripherals, and to write all necessary operating system and user software. This project isn't retro because it's old, it's retro because it was designed to be. Check out the project log.
Flow control is implemented by means of three pairs of instructions.
Memory input and output is accomplished through the abuse of six G1
instructions (dealing with indexed register memory access). The G1 instructions
incorporate and subsume the ALU instruction. As such
they could be seen as 66 different instructions, but this author will
