[geeks] Crackpot project, need some guidance

[Shannon]

On 15-Jul-2011 09:50, Mark Benson wrote:
> I have a crackpot scheme brewing in my head to build a simple computer in
> software. I don't know the damnedt thing about how or what language but I want
> to do it.

That's awesome.

I've done it before, starting in college by writing simulators for
machines before we tried out new instruction sets and then we'd write
assemblers and compilers for our "machines".

A real crackpot idea I have right now is to simulate a 50s/60s era
machine using shell script, like each one does a different function, and
things like named pipes become busses, etc.

For awhile I worked on a Univac emulator. It was an odd machine that did
decimal math.

The problem was I could not find any Univac code and didn't feel like
writing my own and all the tools chains it might have had, so I
eventually gave up.

Anyway, simulating machines, parts of machines, or just ideas in
hardware and operating systems is a lot of fun.

One neat thing is to do something like this:

Write a shell script that requests data from memory locations by writing
the address to the "bus", which is itself a couple of files. Use locking
to "aquire the buss" for different parts of the machine.

Another script is the memory controller which fetches the memory from a
set of small files.

Then play with things like putting a cache controller in there which
never halts and stores things in memory, and all kinds of stuff.

Very abstract but I had a lot of fun with it years ago just playing with
ideas.

Of course, I did the same thing with C and other languages.