Congrats on the POTY. I have not checked on this project in a while and I must say that I am really pleased with the progress you made. Great work

I am personally very exited about the eZ80. They finally listened to us The hardware looks pretty straightforward: you got your ASIC with the cpu ram and link assist in it, your screen and some passives to blend it all together. As opposed to the CSE this is not a TI84+ with a color screen slapped on. It's its own thing. With that said I hope it is backward compatible with programs written for the CSE e.g. tiboy, steins gate, portal and all the other amazing software releases from the past two years.

There is one concern I have with this new cpu: is the LCD fast enough to keep up with the cpu or will we have to introduce wait-cycles again just like with the monochrome lcd? This is not the end of the world, but it would be a considerable bottleneck for graphics-intensive applications.

Project page: http://8times8.eeems.me:81/project/software/visicom/

The Visicom is a textphone for deaf people from the 80's. It has a keyboard, video output and built in modem. You could use it as a textphone using the textphone protocol or as a teletype (tty) using the built in modem.

I bought this at a thriftshop because it looked interesting.
I decided to crack it open and find out exactly what makes it tick. Detailed documentation can be found on my project page.


Guts

Left: Video output. You're greeted with a dutch menu. This image shows B&W video, but there is a switch inside the device which enables 8 color video.
Right: Rom reader device I built to dump the firmware. The disassembly can be found here: http://8times8.eeems.me:81/project/software/visicom/disassembly.php

I found an open-source disassembler written in Golang for the tms7001 microcontroller that is inside the visicom, but it was really buggy. I managed to fix a lot of the bugs. I published the disassembled rom on my website. Using javascript I made all addresses operands links so you can jump by clicking them.
Rom disassembly can be found here: http://8times8.eeems.me:81/project/software/visicom/#h2

I am now able to write my own code for the device. So far I can:
- Set up the serial clock generator.
- Control the MCU's internal I/O port.
- Use interrupts
- Read and write data over serial (using the ACIA)
- Read keystrokes from the keyboard

I solved some interrupt problems by looking at the disassembly. It seems like the people who designed this thing ran into the same problems as I did
Next I want to output characters on the screen.

I wrote a brainfuck interpreter and code editor for the arduino. It works with 3 buttons and it is pretty basic, but perhaps you can make use of it. You'd have to modify it to work with a character display.

That metanight looks pretty sweet.

Quote from: Matrefeytontias on November 10, 2014, 02:30:36 pm

Code: [Select]

while(oreo)
    oreo--;

Looking though this again, you could optimize:

Code: [Select]

while(oreo--);

I think the compiler does that for you.

In both cases the outcome is:
while:
branch if oreo is zero: endwhile
oreo --
branch to while
endwhile:

I volunteer for beta testing