First working emulator.

I will release all the source code and runnable versions of the programs and so on, but not yet (it will be mostly Java)

However I have managed to get a working SM-510 emulator going (see picture). I haven't bought a Mac, it is ArchLinux with Cupertino decorations (same as Mac).

This is part of my emulator framework, which does 99% of the work here ; all you have to do is tell it what to put in the CPU area, the code memory area and the data memory area. It also provides stuff like an expression evaluator for assemblers and a beeper that tend to get used a fair bit (have you ever tried to write code to simply beep in C# ???)

It won't work for really complicated processors but it works fine for the 4 and 8 bit processors I've tried it on and some really old ones (I have been tinkering with really old computers like SEAC and the TX-0, TX-0 is 18 bits wide and SEAC is 40. One big mid innings tweak was to change the datatype from int to long to cope with the very wide instruction words)

The framework does all the work of the time synchronisation and single stepping and breakpoints and all that kind of stuff. It's a little primitive but it does basically work.  As you can see from the picture I haven't quite got the hang of Swing layouts yet, hence the big white gap at the bottom :)

All you need to do is to subclass the Processor class and ask it to implement a couple of interfaces so the controller can interrogate and control it. Going from the processor class which just emulated the CPU to this working emulator took about 20 minutes.

There is one cheat though. Many of these early CPUs do not use a program counter that goes up in ones, but a recycling shift register (look up LFSR on wikipedia) which generates a predictable pseudo random sequence. Presumably because it is much lighter on silicon. So instead of numbers going 0,1,2,3 it goes 0,13,23,14,7,57,48 or something like that. I have simply missed that out. I'm pretty certain that the developer tools (as with the TMS series) sort this out for you and you just pretend it doesn't exist. Otherwise all your code lines would be mixed up.

At the moment, this cannot run anything at all (the code and data in the display above is just random numbers used for testing). There are some very good free macroassemblers out there - ASL will assemble all kinds of wierd and wonderful processors, but nothing that will Assemble SM-510 source.

So the next task is to create an assembler so I can actually get some real code running.

Then I will implement the hardware interface - this system here works but the I/O commands go into the ether - a dummy implementation of the IHardware interface is connected to it.  This means the display will look much the same but it will acquire a partner window, which is the watch display face.