[Oberon] Emulators

[Jörg]

Wojtek

> How can I proceed, in practical terms, to use your JS emulator for development?

Perhaps we should start discussing, WHAT you want to change. At the moment I see three different levels of HW modifications:  easy, more difficult, impossible.

Basically, see an emulator as virtualization. In virtualization you have a host machine (where the emulator runs on) and a guest machine (this is the FPGA board). I ignore „containers“ at the moment

Easy: if you want to extend the RISC-5 instruction set in Verilog (eg add an autoincrement instruction) the modification of the emulator is rather straight forward. I neglect the fact that you have to modify the Oberon-07 compiler to use this new instruction, because this is not important for the emulator.

More difficult: if you want to add IO mapped HW (eg Ethernet or Wifi) or memory mapped HW (eg color display) to your FPGA and the host machine has an equivalent of this HW, with a little bit of effort the emulator can be modified to map the IO register commands or new memory layout to the corresponding host HW.

Impossible: if you want to add HW to your FPGA and the host machine does not have an equivalent HW (eg a neutrino sensor) then it‘s impossible for the emulator to mimic the new FPGA HW.

br
Jörg