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Playing with some older ideas

A project log for Arduino Desktop

The desktop with an arduino as the main processor. Multitasking, Gaming, Graphics, and (later) File IO

dylan-brophyDylan Brophy 04/29/2017 at 04:550 Comments

I decided to try porting an ancient emulator I wrote to my Arduino Desktop. A while ago I built what I call the MMC. It has nothing to do with MMC cards, MMC stands for Modular Mega Computer. It was pretty cool, except low specs (not enough disk space, too difficult to program, and bad graphics) made it quickly useless. The best part about it however was the MMC Processor design. This was a 16-bit CISC processor that is probably the best processor design I ever made - and has the absolute WORST documentation.... I stumbled upon the assembler I wrote for it, and decided to look for the Arduino file. I knew its name stated with computer, but that's not too helpful because I literally polluted my arduino sketchbook with files like "Computer_1", "Computer_2", "Computer_160512", or whatever. After looking through a few files I found it.

After porting it and fixing some weird problems with the assembler I got it to run on my mostly unmodified arduino desktop. All I added was a new Seeed studio Ethernet shield V2, which I don't intend on removing. I also redesigned it to boot from a SD card, instead of a parallax SmartCard like before.

I got a hello world program to boot if the SD card couldn't be booted, so everything is working so far! SD card won't boot right though - Always there is an Invalid Opcode Error.

I will continue testing to see if I want to switch to my MMC architecture, or keep my Arduino Multitasking OS. I must admit, MMC is very tempting...

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