I finally got around to making some (ASMR) style videos of coding and testing Viro. My virtual, retro inspired, fully programmable computer written entirely with in Godot. Been a lot of updates this week and I hope to have RC3 out by the end of next week. These videos are also in this format so they can be used by students in the classroom as video manuals along with the physical one. They’re designed to be non distracting to others.
Today I also implemented the assembly performance engine which is now completely seperate to the debug engine. It gives a significant boost when you’re done with debugging. On average about 50000 instructions a second quicker.
The testing by students and teachers at the UNI I’m working with so far has been great. They haven’t managed to break it yet. The feedback I’ve had is that it’s great to have a sandboxed environment to code assembly in without any chance of breaking the host computer.
You can also find out more information on my GitHub.
This project sounds awesome. I’m no computer scientist, but provided a safe-space to mess up and learn is amazing. Especially for university students. They need that more than anything.
It’s working amazing well, though every day I find something I’ve overlooked, today was finding that there was no system error trap on the RTI (return from interrupt) instruction if no interrupt was active. Also the IRQ (soft interrupt) instructions wasn’t checking to see if an interrupt was already running.
I guess I am designing and creating a computer / compiler / assembly language engine from the ground up.
This is not my first attempt at this, but with Godot it is certainly the best. Huge thanks need to go to the Godot team, without them this wouldn’t be possible.
My background is in writing boot strap code and compilers. It’s been great fun to create what I think is my dream retro computer. I’ll never be able to find a working and in good condition Apple Iic Plus, with a mocking board. The holy grail.
It’s feels great to create something that others find useful and especially in the education arena. I was sitting in the classroom the other day with the students and they seemed to love the challenge of writing code that works quickly and efficiently in a retro environment with all the restrictions not found on modern computers. Also got to do a little assembly language teaching as well.