Can't wait to see FORTH running on this CPU!
FORTH ?KNOW IF HONK ELSE FORTH LEARN THEN
Notch's Specification for the In-Game DCPU-16
21–30 of 177 posts
Re: Notch's Specification for the In-Game DCPU-16
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Although some of the implications require experience to understand, I'd say it already is in "relatively plain English", you simply haven't been exposed to the vocabulary and concepts necessary. Trying to explain in any detail would basically be reproducing Wikipedia, so here are some links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_counter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_(computer_architecture) http://en.wikipedia.org/…
Reading all these wikipedia pages is going to kill at least an hour of productivity today :/
And it will enable countless years of productivity!
Re: Notch's Specification for the In-Game DCPU-16
#23Now here's an interesting bit: "Question: can we trade the programs we create? How will you stop malicious viruses etc?" "yes. And I won't stop viruses, the players will have to do that themselves." ~ https://twitter.com/#!/notch/status/187474819980328962
Nice. With a bit of fiddling one could perhaps invert an enemy's shield polarity.
That always seems to work miracles in any sci-fi show.
Re: Notch's Specification for the In-Game DCPU-16
#24Just waiting for the first post about programming this CPU to pop up on Stack Overflow ... :) It's quite an interesting architecture. From an initial perusal, I found these features note-worthy: * Explicit access to PC as a register, makes "computed goto" trivial and very natural. * Because of the above, there is no JMP instruction. * Treating operations on registers as "values" makes the instruction set very orthogo…
> No instructions for bit-manipulation. What? Plenty of opcodes for that. SHL, SHR, AND, BOR, XOR are all bitwise operators. Unless you mean bitset and bitclear macros, but no self respecting embedded programmer uses those. I've disagreed with almost everything else Notch has done, but from a simple pedagogical standpoint, he's doing the right thing by leaving those out.
Why do you disagree? I've only been following this casually and don't now too much about the depths of what's going on.
Re: Notch's Specification for the In-Game DCPU-16
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Although some of the implications require experience to understand, I'd say it already is in "relatively plain English", you simply haven't been exposed to the vocabulary and concepts necessary. Trying to explain in any detail would basically be reproducing Wikipedia, so here are some links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_counter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_(computer_architecture) http://en.wikipedia.org/…
Reading all these wikipedia pages is going to kill at least an hour of productivity today :/
Depends on what you define as being productive. I personally perceive learning as something productive.
Re: Notch's Specification for the In-Game DCPU-16
#26Now here's an interesting bit: "Question: can we trade the programs we create? How will you stop malicious viruses etc?" "yes. And I won't stop viruses, the players will have to do that themselves." ~ https://twitter.com/#!/notch/status/187474819980328962
Somebody can write anti-virus software for the game and sell it!
Re: Notch's Specification for the In-Game DCPU-16
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a self-taught programmer, and don't know much about CPUs. Would someone mind putting this into relatively plain english, I'm quite curious to know the practical implications of this. Can we expect to see Python running on it in the near future for example :) ?
Although some of the implications require experience to understand, I'd say it already is in "relatively plain English", you simply haven't been exposed to the vocabulary and concepts necessary. Trying to explain in any detail would basically be reproducing Wikipedia, so here are some links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_counter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_(computer_architecture) http://en.wikipedia.org/…
> a highly dynamic language is unlikely
Lua, perhaps? There was an article how to reduce its binary size, for an older version of the language (Lua 4.0): http://www.lua.org/notes/ltn002.html
With no reductions, and for x86 assembly, it started at ~64KB, so not very useful here; but after dropping standard libraries and parser, they got to ~24KB. Now however, some further questions arise I'm not sure about:
- whether such a virtual machine, when without parser, would be anyhow more useful than the underlying system alone?
- how much the binary code would be bigger when compiled for the "DCPU-16" instruction set instead of x86?
Re: Notch's Specification for the In-Game DCPU-16
#28Just for fun, I wrote a disassembler for his instruction set. https://gist.github.com/2300590 I previously wrote some assembler routines for x86, which is very complex, working with Notch's design is a breeze and actually enjoyable. Does he somewhere mention if the code is loaded into the RAM? This would make self-modifiable code possible.
It doesn’t say in the spec, unless you interpret the memory dump for his assembled example as residing at address 0x0000 rather than offset 0x0000. But I don’t see any reason why PC shouldn’t refer to a RAM address. It would be great for code economy in such a constrained system.
Re: Notch's Specification for the In-Game DCPU-16
#29Just waiting for the first post about programming this CPU to pop up on Stack Overflow ... :) It's quite an interesting architecture. From an initial perusal, I found these features note-worthy: * Explicit access to PC as a register, makes "computed goto" trivial and very natural. * Because of the above, there is no JMP instruction. * Treating operations on registers as "values" makes the instruction set very orthogo…
I'm a self-taught programmer, and don't know much about CPUs. Would someone mind putting this into relatively plain english, I'm quite curious to know the practical implications of this. Can we expect to see Python running on it in the near future for example :) ?
I strongly recommend you to read the course book "The Elements of Computing Systems" [1]. This explains the whole principle in very plain English. It has an extremely intuitive and easy to follow logic and set of exercises you can do.
It has completely demystified the whole low level world of computers for me.
If you can't get the book, a number of exercises and chapters are available for free at this website[2].
[1]: http://www1.idc.ac.il/tecs/ [2]: http://diycomputerscience.com/courses/course/the-elements-of...
Re: Notch's Specification for the In-Game DCPU-16
#30This might be a stupid question but where does the output go? Is it just a memory location? And does that memory location map to a "ship function"?
So, er, on a PC if I write data to address 0x378 it'll appear on LPT1. What's the equivalent on DCPU-16? If I write data to a certain address it'll appear on the missile bay ports?
Or is there a level of abstraction?