I asserted yesterday that the Forth sources I was viewing on the PicoCalc were the system sources, and you "could" recompile them and reboot.
Well, here's what it looks like to do so!
Enjoy this riveting 90 second video of a 40 MHz CFM CPU emulating itself in software, recompiling the operating system. Also, me typing on the world's worst keyboard. (Seriously. The PicoCalc's keyboard is a torture device.)
The machine is still running on the Icoboard tethered to the PicoCalc with dupont wires, because I haven't finished my FPGA replacement brain.
It's emulating itself in software because of my Turducken approach that I mentioned recently (see the docs in the repo). There's actually a second core in the FPGA that I could use instead; doing it this way cuts the time to something like 10 seconds, last I measured.
The words related to bootstrapping using a target system (in this case, an emulator) have historically been in <angle> <brackets> but... angle brackets are so fricking unreliable to type on the PicoCalc that I just might change that!
This is how you wind up with C-style names isn't it
@cliffle Wow, 40 MHz is premium for a calculator! :) I wasted a lot of time in high school hacking the 6 MHz Z80 in the TI-82.
@pervognsen @cliffle Too bad the Ti-89 with a 68000 processor didn't become the standard calculator in schools.
@ids1024 @pervognsen I still have my 68000-based TI-92! I wrote a Forth for it in college.
@pervognsen PicoCalc came with a dual-core 200MHz ARM, I just removed it because CPUs that are finished are boring, so I replaced it with my own design. 😃
(It's also a shit calculator -- no numeric keypad, the math operators are all on shift-keys, etc. Its name is poor.)
@cliffle I was considering getting myself a picocalc. What makes the keyboard so bad besides the obvious fact that it's small?
@dpiponi it's like a bad TV remote, rubber chiclets that click whether or not they electrically register. So you can see in the video I have to retype things several times.
@cliffle Thanks. That helps me decide.
@pervognsen @cliffle Yes, I need an answer to this too. I know about https://www.swissmicros.com/en/shop but they're pricey