Tommy Thorn @tommythorn@chaos.social

After having tried to get a GPU for 2+ years I finally got one ... four months ago - I only now got around to installing it. Guess I learned to cope without PC gaming.

Is Xilinx UltraScale+ still the fastest #fpga fabric or is there something faster (like Intel Agilex or the FPGA part of the odd Xilinx Versal ACAP)?
Anything affordable besides Artix-US+ ?

Since at least a decade I've been writing dates in "shorted" ISO-8601 format, that is YYYYMMDD (it's compact, unambiguous, and sorts correctly), and now I'm debating getting used to using UTC everywhere. #theunreasonableman

I can really relate to Murphy https://youtu.be/NqciaXsAURU but things got a lot better.

My arbiter runs at 775 MHz on the Xilinx Artix-US+ -2
I feel a romance brewing.

Have been running Ubuntu and Fedora on RISC-V for years, but just tried openSUSE - super trivial to get going. Will try Arch Linux if I can get it working.

☑Download Xilinx Vivado 2022.1
☑Install on Ubuntu 21.10
☐Build a blinky

A big thank-you to Martin Sørensen, Finn Verner Nielsen, Uffe Jakobsen, and Peter Jensen who made all this possible (I'm pretty sure none of them are on Mastodon though).

So much is remarkable about the program but one thing is mind boggling: it's a runtime (incl. floating point), a full-screen text editor, and a native mode compiler in just 12 KiB.

The "E" command takes you to the full screen editor (Control-X to get back to the prompt)

I had only version 1.2 of BLS Pascal but I had found exactly 1 reference to a version 1.3 and unfortunately the only copy of the net was corrupted. So I have been chasing a good copy for more than 10 years. A few years ago I found a picture of a tape with it (http://datamuseum.dk/wiki/Genstand:11000761) and since then I have been nagging them every few months to digitize it for me. This morning it was in my mail. However it sort of came in pieces and it took me a bit to get it put together but here it is:
2/4

My first computer was a Nascom 2, a 4 MHz, Z80 based computer kit, soldered together by yours truly (originally had 2 KiB with 0.75 KiB free, but ended up with 80 KiB after many extensions). I started and "maintain" nascomhomepage.com to collect (save before it's too late) all the software. However, by far the most important piece of software IMhO was Blue Label Software (BLS) Pascal; written by the only and only Ander Hejlsberg. BLS Pascal eventually became Turbo Pascal.
1/4

Needless to say, I have tried many obvious and non-obvious candidates, but it crashes and returns to the monitor. So close.

For 20+ years I have been chasing the version 1.3 of BLS #Pascal (have version 1.2); a few years ago I discovered a tape in a museum http://datamuseum.dk/wiki/Genstand:11000761 and today I finally got a binary version. The good news is that the version appears error-free. However, the starting address is unknown (no body has the documentation), so now I've hacking up a #Nascom specific #Z80 disassembler in Rust, trying to make sense if it. Not there yet.

“I want to say one word to you. Just one word.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Are you listening?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Microthreads.”

@swetland seems I can’t reply on Twitter but did you consider a minimal gdb stub? It supports console out as well (not input IIRC).

Eh, which one is the right one, #Rust or #Rustlang?

I have just discovered https://uazu.github.io/stakker/about.html, an Actor implementation for #Rust. While there are very many of such, Stakker is *exactly* what I've been looking for and I'm very excited.
BTW, if you love #Rust and OoO microprocessor implementation, come work with me Esperanto, post haste! We have full time positions. Reach out for more details, full discretion guaranteed. Please let me know how to reach the right audience.