Wednesday, May 31, 2017

First Major Update - the perils of creating CPU without copy/paste capabilities


Copy and Paste is kinda important

There are many things that are important to every developer, but none of it is as important as having a good editor. In current world of application development, features like copy-pasting and undoing-redoing stuff is as essential as just an ability to save and load files.
As far back in time as I can remember I was always fascinated by computers and wanted to learn their internal structure. First step on this was 13 years ago, when I learned Assembly, MASM to be precise. It was fun and interesting, but then as a miracle - I learned about gate logic.

Creating a Memory Chip when there is no Memory Chip

So my recent search for a perfect (or semi-perfect) ended with Logic.ly. At first - it was perfect - cool design, smart use of switches and "lighbulbs". Copying and pasting functionality with wires. Unfortunately my trial for it has ended, and I can't show you a really nice computer I built there... I do have a gif of it in "almost done" state:

It is running at staggering 3-20 gate-instructions per second. It is around 0.05 Hz. Terrific.
The reason behind it is absence of memory chip functionality for it. Not even as a temporary storage (best option would be file on my OS, that would allow for some ROM shenanigans). So I had to program a memory chip using flip-flops organized in columns (really wish I was able to show it) and then in rows. Usually CMOS works faster than most types of RAM, but it really ate my processing power. It took logic.ly 2 minutes to load this chip. Oh! And you know what beastly amount of RAM it has? 64 bytes. Not Kilobytes. Just bytes. I tried 256 bytes, but it never loaded.
Don't get me wrong. What I'm doing with that app is far from what it was intended to do, but I want my goddamm CPU.
Also, after all this... you can't edit the sub-network you just created. Pure sadness.
So the search continued...

To be continued next week.

I'm thinking about starting a weekly tutorials for logic gates on smartsim. Tune in for binary logic tutorials tag in here. Hopefully first one will be tomorrow.

Also, I'm sorry about such a small MAJOR update, but I find it hard writing something cohesive in non-native language. Hopefully it will get better with time.

Cheers!

Monday, May 29, 2017

Intro

Welcome to the Neth Iafin's blog.


I'm a developer from Ukraine, working in enterprise development (C#+JS). I greet you to the place where my attempts to code something worthy will be documented. Strap yourselves, because the trip is going to be bumpy.
Also you will be able see my opinion of some games and other stuff, if you need a second pair of eyes.

You may expect major update every 2 weeks, and some nonsense posts in-between.

Cheers!

Intro

Welcome to the Neth Iafin's blog. I'm a developer from Ukraine, working in enterprise development (C#+JS). I greet you to the pla...