Category Archives: assembler

Kathleen Booth: Assembling Early Computers While Inventing Assembly

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Imagine having to program your computer by rewiring it. For a brief period of time around the mid-1940s, the first general-purpose electronic computers worked that way. Computers like ENIAC initially had no internal storage for code. Programming it involved manipulating thousands of switches and cables. The positions of those switches and cables were the program.

Kathleen Booth began working on computers just as the idea of storing the program internally was starting to permeate through the small set of people building computers. As a result, she was one of the first programmers to work on software and is credited with …read more

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Virtual CPU Stays on Script

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Some will see it as a great thing, and others as an example of how JavaScript is being abused daily, but [Francis Stokes] decided to design his own CPU architecture and implemented a virtual version of it using JavaScript. The CPU is a 16-bit affair and has a simplified assembly language. The code is on GitHub, but the real value is [Francis’] exposition of the design in the original post.

While discussing the design, [Francis] reveals his first pass at the instruction set, discussed what he found wrong about it, and then reveals the final set composed of real instructions …read more

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Building an OBD Speed Pulse: Behold the ICE

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I am a crappy software coder when it comes down to it. I didn’t pay attention when everything went object oriented and my roots were always assembly language and Real Time Operating Systems (RTOS) anyways.

So it only natural that I would reach for a true In-Circuit-Emulator (ICE) to finish of my little OBDII bus to speed pulse generator widget. ICE is a hardware device used to debug embedded systems. It communicates with the microcontroller on your board, allowing you to view what is going on by pausing execution and inspecting or changing values in the hardware registers. If you …read more

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Building an OBD Speed Pulse: Behold the ICE

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I am a crappy software coder when it comes down to it. I didn’t pay attention when everything went object oriented and my roots were always assembly language and Real Time Operating Systems (RTOS) anyways.

So it only natural that I would reach for a true In-Circuit-Emulator (ICE) to finish of my little OBDII bus to speed pulse generator widget. ICE is a hardware device used to debug embedded systems. It communicates with the microcontroller on your board, allowing you to view what is going on by pausing execution and inspecting or changing values in the hardware registers. If you …read more

Continue reading Building an OBD Speed Pulse: Behold the ICE→

Lightweight Game Console Packs a Punch

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Any maker worth their bits will look for new ways to challenge themselves. [Robert Fotino], a computer science student at the University of California, is doing just that: designing and building his own lightweight hobbyist game console that he has appropriately named Consolite.

[Fotino] wrote his own compiler in C++ that converts from C-like languages to a custom-designed assembler that he has dubbed Consolite Assembly. To test his code, he also wrote an emulator before loading it onto the Mimas V2 FPGA board. Presently, Consolite  uses 64KiB of main memory and 48 KiB of video memory; a future version will …read more

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