[Oberon] FPGA Oberon vs Ceres

Andreas Pirklbauer andreas_pirklbauer at yahoo.com
Sun Jan 27 18:33:44 CET 2019


   > The upper levels of the System may stayed, but the lower levels have probably changed a bit.
   > I think that low level drivers have changed, like for example the disk which is now SD card
   > served over SPI. The network is now wireless, so I am not sure if it is the same as the Ceres RS-422.

You are of course right. I was referring mostly to the upper parts. In addition to the compiler, device
drivers did indeed (have to) change as well, e.g., keyboard and mouse now use the PS-2 interface
standard, the “disk” (well, an SD card in FPGA Oberon..) no longer uses SCSI, but the SPI interface,
RS-485 is no longer used for the net, etc.

It is, perhaps, also interesting to note that some (but not all) device drivers were written in assembly
code back then, but are now written entirely in Oberon. An example is the display driver Display.Mod
(a common student exercise at ETH was to implement CopyBlock in NS32032, MC68000.. assembly).



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