Thursday 16 July 2015

App # 1 : MC14500B Evaluation Board

Well, I changed my mind about this. Partly because all the documentation regarding the WDR-1 is in German, and this emulation (on the right) is the Motorola Evaluation kit, which is very similar (the primary difference is memory is arranged as 4 bits rather than 8 bits) and it's in English. I don't speak a lot of German (may improve as I'm spending a week in Germany from Monday, but I'm probably not going to use the German for "Program Counter" much).

Most of this is done, the only bit missing is the actual emulation of the processor.

Seems a bit pointless, but it gave me some opportunities to experiment with ideas for interfaces. It's also an insane thing to program as it has no loops (other than reset to the start) in most implementations, which means everything is state machines. You can have branches and subroutines but none of the hardware is present in the 14500, all it does is pulse a chip pin "Jump" or whatever.

Almost none of the switches and LEDs are placed manually, they are generated by having another object create it, below is what the design screen actually looks like. Each purple IO says what to draw, how many bits, and whether it is input or output. This data is then copied to and from a dictionary, which acts as an intermediary between the interface and the program. Push buttons call a function derived from an instance variable. It works quite well.

Part of Construct 2's Editor Window

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