Smile! I tried attaching it after visiting the picassa site. So Microcontrolled, I've seen it, and have it on my desktop! But I cannot attach it here in a viewable way.
I can see your alternative, but go and look at my post above. I captured the image from picassa, loaded it into paint, and saved it off in various formats, none of which render here. Weird.
Speaking of moving avatars, does mine spin? I assumed it did but seeing as people can see their own ones move and others can't I don't know [noparse]:)[/noparse]
Raf
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UC Berkeley '12 EECS
CalSol: UC Berkeley Solar Car http://calsol.berkeley.edu
KJ6AWU
Microcontrolled, man, I gotta call ya out. You can't hate on a proc just because it's 8-bit. Some of the coolest stuff ever has been 8-bit.
I got a few examples but the one I'm gonna haul out here, is the 1802. Because it don't get much cooler than the 1802. See, the 1802 had 16 registers, and they were so general purpose that they had a 4-bit register, and what this 4-bit register pointed to was the instruction pointer. You know, like the register that holds the next instruction that's gonna get executed. So you could be using R3 as the IP, and decide to call a subroutine, and you could just load that routine's starting point in R6 and point the 4-bit pointer at R6 and BLAMMO you are running the subroutine. And when the subroutine wants to return it just switches the 4-bit pointer back to R3 and BLAMMO you are back in Kansas. And with about 30 instructions you could implement a true recursive stack and call/return structure even though the proc didn't natively support it. How cool is that?
The Prop could almost pull that register-as-IP thing off even better with 9-bit instead of 4-bit goodness except for its instruction pipeline, which makes jumps different from other register manipulations. Yeah, makes the chip 50% faster but I miss the elegance, the ELEGANCE I tell ya, of that CPU that only had a couple of thousand transistors. And it was the first cpu radiation hardened for space travel, so it was used on the Voyager, Viking, and Galileo space probes, as well as thousands of Earth satellites. And somewhere as I write this someone is being paid well to remain conversant with 1802 assembly because the Voyagers are still out there, encountering the heliopause, and returning valuable information about the real extent of our solar system from more than 100 AU out.
So don't go dissin' my 8 bit friends. Or I might have to have a word about you with my BFF Happy Fun Ball.
@localroger: I'm really just jealous that I didn't live in the era of the elegant 8 bit. Sure the new chips are faster, but the ol 8 bits have all but been made extinct. You older guys are lucky. You got to see and use the Sinclair, the Commodore 64, the Apple II...... But me? I'm living in a world where people buy electronics depending on their looks, programs because of their graphics, and operating systems because they look shiny. Most of the people around neither know nor care about how the electronics of today work. It was the good ol' days when computers ran on a command line and phones were JUST phones. When paying for software that you didn't OWN was unheard of, and when electronics were MADE to be hacked in to. Now in the days of the shiny icons and cool graphics you can't keep up with an 8-bit. I am now forced to use 32-bit microprocessors in order to keep up with the ever increasing technology rate. Lucky for all of us. there is the Propeller, and programming is fun again. Now with 8 processors in one chip, I have an alternative to keeping up with the change of tech that doesn't involve writing boring computer programs. So I'm not 'dissn your 8-bit micros. I just wish I could have used them. You go 'round brag'n like that 'gain, and I'll have to sic Happy Fun Ball on you.
The "bar" keeps changing. People spent a lot of effort coming up with algorithms that were sort of practical with hand cranked mechanical calculators that did their multiplication and division slowly with repeated addition or subtraction, then got lazy when motor driven cranks were developed. Incredible effort was spent in optimizing hand assembled programs when serial memories were used so that operands were in the "proper place" when the instruction using them was executed, because you had to wait for the operand to show up at the playback head of the rotating drum. One computer I wrote programs for didn't have addresses. It fetched the next operand that showed up on the drum. You could select a track number, but not a particular word on that track. You had to insert NOPs for delays to get the right operand.
Now there are new and different challenges and rules. Another 10 years from now there will be new stuff. You might as well get used to the idea now.
microcontrolled said...
@localroger: I'm really just jealous that I didn't live in the era of the elegant 8 bit. Sure the new chips are faster, but the ol 8 bits have all but been made extinct. You older guys are lucky. You got to see and use the Sinclair, the Commodore 64, the Apple II...... But me? I'm living in a world where people buy electronics depending on their looks, programs because of their graphics, and operating systems because they look shiny. Most of the people around neither know nor care about how the electronics of today work. It was the good ol' days when computers ran on a command line and phones were JUST phones.
@Microcontrolled:
Actually there are still a lot of us who still own and appreciate 8bit micros. I'm a C64 junkie myself, (have been for years) and still own (too many) Commodore units. Many of the programs have been migrated to newer storage mediums, as well as various "modern" drive interfaces, keeping you from having to play with 5.25 floppy disks. (Had to correct my spelling on that as I originally typed "discs", wow) I have a C64 with about 10,000 games (stored on a single CF card) which I lug out from time to time as I feel the desire. [noparse]:)[/noparse] Got a pretty extensive Apple collection as well.
It was a Commodore emulator project (which was never completed) which got me over to the strange land of Propeller. [noparse]:)[/noparse]
OBC said "It was a Commodore emulator project (which was never completed) which got me over to the strange land of Propeller. [noparse]:)[/noparse]"
Nascom, for me, I just wanted to sort out a simpler way of getting a 48x16 VDU. AVRs got close with loads of 40x16 ( I particularly liked the Bat Socks 38x10 for compactness ) then the VGA thing was waved in my face, then Heater started Zicog. Along with all this Clusso and Dr_A produce hardware designs and now Pullmoll is bashing out code fast enough to make me hide in the corner and cry with shame.
I was starting to think along the lines of CPLDs and FPGAs to do what I wanted ( as if it would ever happen ) but the Prop is a fantastic little building brick that, with the coding and help of this forum, is showing true flexibility. A few more pins would be handy !
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Style and grace : Nil point
I started on Apple ][noparse][[/noparse] machines, 1Mhz 8 bit 6502. Moved to Atari machines of my own, two of which I still own. My favorite 8 bitter is the color computer 3, with it's great 6809 CPU.
A friend linked me to the Propeller. I lurked for perhaps a week, then was intrigued by the design, downloaded the block diagram, and proceeded to just think about it. After a time, which was not too long, I realized what SPIN and PASM were likely to be like, and it hit me that the Prop is a lot like older, simpler computers, with the added bonus of being able to develop on a modern PC with relative ease.
The video capability is fun for me, largely because I like working at that level, and have successfully implemented a few ideas I had back when it was much more expensive to do so. One strong appeal to me is the modern day relevance the Propeller has. I love small computers, having worked on large and complex ones for a long time, I kind of got burned out, just wanting to have some clean, computing fun, which the Propeller provides.
Frankly, on the video end of things, I'm consistently amazed at what is getting done, and by the possibilities that remain to be exploited.
Right now, I'm enjoying learning the basics to interface the Propeller to more things, and have had a lot of fun building various signals, viewing them on the scope, and that takes me way back to the Atari and it's (4) 4 bit audio output channels. Used to do lots of stuff with that too, but at a slower speed. Propellers are just a lot of fun in this way. It's not overly hard to do stuff, and when stuff is done, the overhead is low, and that's the appeal the older machines had.
If I had the time, I would totally put a Prop on slot 7 of an Apple computer, and build out a prop ][noparse][[/noparse], where the Propeller runs native, assisting the old 6502 in the machine, much like the CP/M and 6809 cards did back in the day.
Re: A few more pins. It's very interesting to see the current projects and know that having 64 pins on the thing would still be seen as a bottleneck for some of you. That element of the Propeller design is simply excellent.
@Microcontrolled -- The elegant 8 bit ain't dead, but you're right that it's on life support.
You can still get current systems running pretty elegant 4-bit uC's. Wait, I hear you asking, 4-bit? Such as the Intel 804x and 805x series. Those were some pretty cool chips, totally self-contained with UVEPROM (2 or 4 whole K!) and non-Von Neumann memory, separate memory areas for data and code (and lots of kludges to bridge the gap in practice). So what makes a chip with an 8-bit data bus 4-bit? The ALU. 4-bit math. So it took like 32 clocks for most instructions to execute. 12 MHz chip, 1 MHz performance, woo-hoo.
BUT built like brickbats. 804x/805x were at the heart of most automotive computers until a few years ago. Like the 1802 hardened for temperature and radiation far beyond what was done for more powerful chips. Super extremely reliable with counter-timer arrays that look like the great grandparents of a certain rotary vane logoed chip we love. I was writing 805x assembly language in 2002, for a little box called the Blue Earth Micro 440. I put lots of those suckers in to do protocol conversions and such. I had one system where I used them to implement a whole data collection system with login through a serial terminal to print reports, back in the mid 1990's. I had one that was in a stainless steel enclosure in a food processing plant that got some salt water in it. A connector connected to the CPU address bus ended up dipped in the salt water pool at the bottom of the enclosure and it corroded all the pins off and sent the CPU into lalaland and wiped its battery-backed program. Having no spare when I was sent to fix it I reset the CPU, replaced the battery, and reprogrammed it and it worked for four more years until the system was finally upgraded.
You can still buy a Blue Earth u440. I'd still be buying them myself if I hadn't stumbled upon something called the YBox2.
That said, I hate PICs. There is something about them that just seems ungainly and wrong. Probably the total arbitrariness of the I/O scheme, which feels like it was sprayed on a blank pinout diagram by a zoo elephant with a bucket of pin descriptors. Which I suppose sounds ironic considering what I just said about the 804x, but those chips didn't seem all arbitrary; they seemed very well thoght out. You could look at every single thing they did and see how that made some kind of sense. But in PIC land hey, port 3 supports ADC while port 2 doesn't and pins 2 thru 6 can do hardware SPI if you wire them right, and pins 18 and 19 can be the UART if you want one. WHAT?
The problem with the same generation 8-bit chips is that they took so many transistors for the CPU itself there was no room left on the die for a self-contained solution like the 8048 or Prop. So they needed clock chips and external busses and glue logic that made them hard to work with. So you only saw them in systems like the C64, Apple ][noparse][[/noparse], and so on that just aren't practical by today's standards. Nothing like either the 804x or the Prop in 8-bit, unless you count the dreadful PICs which really seem kind of half thought out and behind their time nowadays.
I've been away from the keyboard a lot lately, and wow, this forum is motoring lol
btw, potatohead, I'm glad you didn't have this avatar when you correctly guessed Wolfenstein, it would have eaten all my texture space up lol [noparse]:D[/noparse]
I'd have probably had to have code it the animation lol
Comments
It's a little teeny propeller icon, that spins.
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Propeller Wiki: Share the coolness!
8x8 color 80 Column NTSC Text Object
Safety Tip: Life is as good as YOU think it is!
OK, I can see it. Can you? I'll also try an alternative.
Hmmm... The alternative doesn't move......
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Don't click on this.....
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Propeller Wiki: Share the coolness!
8x8 color 80 Column NTSC Text Object
Safety Tip: Life is as good as YOU think it is!
and this.
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Don't click on this.....
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You only ever need two tools in life. If it moves and it shouldn't use Duct Tape. If it does not move and it should use WD40.
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Don't click on this.....
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Don't click on this.....
Use the Propeller icon!!
Post Edited (microcontrolled) : 3/9/2010 1:30:35 AM GMT
Yes I did. It's a shame gif does not handle an alpha channel. The white background kinda spoils it against the forum.
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You only ever need two tools in life. If it moves and it shouldn't use Duct Tape. If it does not move and it should use WD40.
You can always just attach it to a post, then use the link address anywhere else you want.
-Phil
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Don't click on this.....
Use the Propeller icon!!
But which way is the icon spinning? Clockwise or anticlockwise?
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Catalina - a FREE C compiler for the Propeller - see Catalina
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Don't click on this.....
Use the Propeller icon!!
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24 bit LCD Breakout Board now in. $24.99 has backlight driver and touch sensitive decoder.
If you have not already. Add yourself to the prophead map
Raf
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UC Berkeley '12 EECS
CalSol: UC Berkeley Solar Car
http://calsol.berkeley.edu
KJ6AWU
-Phil
I got a few examples but the one I'm gonna haul out here, is the 1802. Because it don't get much cooler than the 1802. See, the 1802 had 16 registers, and they were so general purpose that they had a 4-bit register, and what this 4-bit register pointed to was the instruction pointer. You know, like the register that holds the next instruction that's gonna get executed. So you could be using R3 as the IP, and decide to call a subroutine, and you could just load that routine's starting point in R6 and point the 4-bit pointer at R6 and BLAMMO you are running the subroutine. And when the subroutine wants to return it just switches the 4-bit pointer back to R3 and BLAMMO you are back in Kansas. And with about 30 instructions you could implement a true recursive stack and call/return structure even though the proc didn't natively support it. How cool is that?
The Prop could almost pull that register-as-IP thing off even better with 9-bit instead of 4-bit goodness except for its instruction pipeline, which makes jumps different from other register manipulations. Yeah, makes the chip 50% faster but I miss the elegance, the ELEGANCE I tell ya, of that CPU that only had a couple of thousand transistors. And it was the first cpu radiation hardened for space travel, so it was used on the Voyager, Viking, and Galileo space probes, as well as thousands of Earth satellites. And somewhere as I write this someone is being paid well to remain conversant with 1802 assembly because the Voyagers are still out there, encountering the heliopause, and returning valuable information about the real extent of our solar system from more than 100 AU out.
So don't go dissin' my 8 bit friends. Or I might have to have a word about you with my BFF Happy Fun Ball.
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Propeller Wiki: Share the coolness!
8x8 color 80 Column NTSC Text Object
Safety Tip: Life is as good as YOU think it is!
It depends if you're looking at it from "up" or "down".
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PG
Micro
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Don't click on this.....
Use the Propeller icon!!
·http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_4004
Jim
Now there are new and different challenges and rules. Another 10 years from now there will be new stuff. You might as well get used to the idea now.
@Microcontrolled:
Actually there are still a lot of us who still own and appreciate 8bit micros. I'm a C64 junkie myself, (have been for years) and still own (too many) Commodore units. Many of the programs have been migrated to newer storage mediums, as well as various "modern" drive interfaces, keeping you from having to play with 5.25 floppy disks. (Had to correct my spelling on that as I originally typed "discs", wow) I have a C64 with about 10,000 games (stored on a single CF card) which I lug out from time to time as I feel the desire. [noparse]:)[/noparse] Got a pretty extensive Apple collection as well.
It was a Commodore emulator project (which was never completed) which got me over to the strange land of Propeller. [noparse]:)[/noparse]
OBC
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Coming soon to a browser near you! PropellerPowered.com
Visit the: PROPELLERPOWERED SIG forum kindly hosted by Savage Circuits.
Nascom, for me, I just wanted to sort out a simpler way of getting a 48x16 VDU. AVRs got close with loads of 40x16 ( I particularly liked the Bat Socks 38x10 for compactness ) then the VGA thing was waved in my face, then Heater started Zicog. Along with all this Clusso and Dr_A produce hardware designs and now Pullmoll is bashing out code fast enough to make me hide in the corner and cry with shame.
I was starting to think along the lines of CPLDs and FPGAs to do what I wanted ( as if it would ever happen ) but the Prop is a fantastic little building brick that, with the coding and help of this forum, is showing true flexibility. A few more pins would be handy !
▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔
Style and grace : Nil point
A friend linked me to the Propeller. I lurked for perhaps a week, then was intrigued by the design, downloaded the block diagram, and proceeded to just think about it. After a time, which was not too long, I realized what SPIN and PASM were likely to be like, and it hit me that the Prop is a lot like older, simpler computers, with the added bonus of being able to develop on a modern PC with relative ease.
The video capability is fun for me, largely because I like working at that level, and have successfully implemented a few ideas I had back when it was much more expensive to do so. One strong appeal to me is the modern day relevance the Propeller has. I love small computers, having worked on large and complex ones for a long time, I kind of got burned out, just wanting to have some clean, computing fun, which the Propeller provides.
Frankly, on the video end of things, I'm consistently amazed at what is getting done, and by the possibilities that remain to be exploited.
Right now, I'm enjoying learning the basics to interface the Propeller to more things, and have had a lot of fun building various signals, viewing them on the scope, and that takes me way back to the Atari and it's (4) 4 bit audio output channels. Used to do lots of stuff with that too, but at a slower speed. Propellers are just a lot of fun in this way. It's not overly hard to do stuff, and when stuff is done, the overhead is low, and that's the appeal the older machines had.
If I had the time, I would totally put a Prop on slot 7 of an Apple computer, and build out a prop ][noparse][[/noparse], where the Propeller runs native, assisting the old 6502 in the machine, much like the CP/M and 6809 cards did back in the day.
Re: A few more pins. It's very interesting to see the current projects and know that having 64 pins on the thing would still be seen as a bottleneck for some of you. That element of the Propeller design is simply excellent.
▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔
Propeller Wiki: Share the coolness!
8x8 color 80 Column NTSC Text Object
Safety Tip: Life is as good as YOU think it is!
There; enough reason for a production run, regardless of the costs.
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Style and grace : Nil point
You can still get current systems running pretty elegant 4-bit uC's. Wait, I hear you asking, 4-bit? Such as the Intel 804x and 805x series. Those were some pretty cool chips, totally self-contained with UVEPROM (2 or 4 whole K!) and non-Von Neumann memory, separate memory areas for data and code (and lots of kludges to bridge the gap in practice). So what makes a chip with an 8-bit data bus 4-bit? The ALU. 4-bit math. So it took like 32 clocks for most instructions to execute. 12 MHz chip, 1 MHz performance, woo-hoo.
BUT built like brickbats. 804x/805x were at the heart of most automotive computers until a few years ago. Like the 1802 hardened for temperature and radiation far beyond what was done for more powerful chips. Super extremely reliable with counter-timer arrays that look like the great grandparents of a certain rotary vane logoed chip we love. I was writing 805x assembly language in 2002, for a little box called the Blue Earth Micro 440. I put lots of those suckers in to do protocol conversions and such. I had one system where I used them to implement a whole data collection system with login through a serial terminal to print reports, back in the mid 1990's. I had one that was in a stainless steel enclosure in a food processing plant that got some salt water in it. A connector connected to the CPU address bus ended up dipped in the salt water pool at the bottom of the enclosure and it corroded all the pins off and sent the CPU into lalaland and wiped its battery-backed program. Having no spare when I was sent to fix it I reset the CPU, replaced the battery, and reprogrammed it and it worked for four more years until the system was finally upgraded.
You can still buy a Blue Earth u440. I'd still be buying them myself if I hadn't stumbled upon something called the YBox2.
That said, I hate PICs. There is something about them that just seems ungainly and wrong. Probably the total arbitrariness of the I/O scheme, which feels like it was sprayed on a blank pinout diagram by a zoo elephant with a bucket of pin descriptors. Which I suppose sounds ironic considering what I just said about the 804x, but those chips didn't seem all arbitrary; they seemed very well thoght out. You could look at every single thing they did and see how that made some kind of sense. But in PIC land hey, port 3 supports ADC while port 2 doesn't and pins 2 thru 6 can do hardware SPI if you wire them right, and pins 18 and 19 can be the UART if you want one. WHAT?
The problem with the same generation 8-bit chips is that they took so many transistors for the CPU itself there was no room left on the die for a self-contained solution like the 8048 or Prop. So they needed clock chips and external busses and glue logic that made them hard to work with. So you only saw them in systems like the C64, Apple ][noparse][[/noparse], and so on that just aren't practical by today's standards. Nothing like either the 804x or the Prop in 8-bit, unless you count the dreadful PICs which really seem kind of half thought out and behind their time nowadays.
-Phil
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24 bit LCD Breakout Board now in. $24.99 has backlight driver and touch sensitive decoder.
If you have not already. Add yourself to the prophead map
btw, potatohead, I'm glad you didn't have this avatar when you correctly guessed Wolfenstein, it would have eaten all my texture space up lol [noparse]:D[/noparse]
I'd have probably had to have code it the animation lol
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http://www.propgfx.co.uk/forum/·home of the PropGFX Lite
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