[Oberon] [EXT] Porting S3 / V4 Oberon (was: File transfer)

[Skulski, Wojciech]

Andreas:

>To repeat: Adding EXIT, LOOP and RETURN to the compiler is certainly
>doable, but the effort to port V4 would have to be real *and* the target
>system would have to be publicly available *and* already run the Oberon
>system (e.g., in the form of an emulator of a system with enough RAM)

In my plans the target system initially will be an emulator with sufficient memory, which is a configuration option. Most likely Michael's because it is more configurable than PDW. His emulator is publicly available. The results will be incrementally available on the web. I do not promise github. I may take the NW lead and uses a plain website or PR lead and release a zip. I plan to develop a board, whose composition depends on the porting effort. I would like to use Wiznet W5300 for Ethernet interface, but this depends on whether or not we can map the device driver. So this will be decided later. In any case, the board will be available from me. If someone wants to develop other boards, this will be even better because it will force rethinking the hardware interfaces. I heard Joerg has some ideas. Having only one board makes any such ideas moot. Having more than one makes them relevant. It would be good to have more than one. Like my board, Pipistrello with 64 MB, D'Emard's boards, and perhaps some commercial ones. If a commercial company steps in to make an FPGA Oberon System laptop, it would be even better.

I am also entertaining an idea to first sweep through the V4 software under V4 itself. That is, clean the original from features which Chris does not like, and still keep V4 working. The ideal system would be 100% compatible between the new x86 V4 and the new RISC5 V4. Grad students at ETH have achieved something like this, but I am not a grad student anymore. I have significantly deteriorated since I was one.

W.