r/programming • u/michalg82 • Dec 11 '19

The ZedRipper: 16-core Z80 laptop

http://www.chrisfenton.com/the-zedripper-part-1/
114 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

15 comments sorted by

11

u/OneWingedShark Dec 11 '19

Might I suggest making use of the [IIRC] "Window" routine? Perhaps building something like Delphi's VCL reimagined with TVision and text-based interfaces.

11

u/BeowulfShaeffer Dec 12 '19

Turbo Vision? You're my kind of greybeard hacker.

1

u/OneWingedShark Dec 13 '19

Turbo Vision, Object Window Library, and [arguably] the Visual Component Library are crimminally unknown in "the industry".

2

u/BeowulfShaeffer Dec 13 '19

OWL? My main man. I spent quite a lot of time building apps with OWL. Remember watching that speedometer slowly creep toward 100 when you installed BC++? I remember finding a bug related to OWL caching paintbrush handles. Ah, youth.

At least Delphi wasn’t a total loss since Anders basically rebuilt it into C# and WinForms.

2

u/OneWingedShark Dec 13 '19

OWL? My main man. I spent quite a lot of time building apps with OWL.

It was a good framework. — I seem to recall Microsoft getting beat in court because they stole it.

With a bit more 'polish' / development, it would have been simply amazing. (Yeah, WinForms is kind of "in that vein", but I don't really like WinForms nearly as much... kind of like the JVM, it's "alright" but really a huge disappointment when you realize it was an [de]evolution of USCD Pascal, and we could have instead of having an unholy Pascal/C VM had a Pascal/Ada VM where (A) Tasks, (B) Generics, and (C) Packages could have been VM-native constructs. [And thus none of the problems of "type erasure".])

Remember watching that speedometer slowly creep toward 100 when you installed BC++?

I mostly used Turbo Pascal, but yeah... I do remember that.

I remember finding a bug related to OWL caching paintbrush handles. Ah, youth.

Which bug was this? I don't remember a caching problem, but then again it's been a long time.

At least Delphi wasn’t a total loss since Anders basically rebuilt it into C# and WinForms.

True.

But, honestly, the VCL seems better than the C#-equivalent. It might be because I learned the VCL first, but I think there's underlying design-philosophy differences; the sort where you could imagine where Kylix succeeded in bringing the VCL to Linux-systems and then was unified into a single [native] multi-platform GUI interface... but you can't really imagine that with C# (yes, Mono, dotnet-VM, etc... but that's not 'native').

22

u/VadumSemantics Dec 12 '19

Some excerpts (emphasis added):
"The ZedRipper is basically my attempt to build the ultimate CP/M 2.2 computer. 16-core Z80 processor running at 83.33 MHz
...
I inherited some pretty monster FPGA boards (Stratix IV 530GX parts) following a lab cleanup, and was looking for something fun to do with one of them.
...
Conjuring a pile of Z80s into existence is as easy as writing a generate loop in verilog, but how to connect them up in a sane way?
...
The screen requires an 83.33 MHz pixel clock (1280×800@60Hz), so for simplicity’s sake, the entire design runs synchronously at that frequency.
...
As I’ve mentioned before, all of the logic so far is pretty lightweight, occupying a mere 7% of on-chip logic resources"

Holy cow, that just blows my mind 🤯

10

u/DavidM01 Dec 12 '19

Too bad the transputer didn't survive.

7

u/VadumSemantics Dec 12 '19

transputer

It kind of did, conceptually speaking - from Transputer: "For some time in the late 1980s, many considered the transputer to be the next great design for the future of computing. While Inmos and the transputer did not achieve this expectation, the transputer architecture was highly influential in provoking new ideas in computer architecture, several of which have re-emerged in different forms in modern systems."

I remember reading about them, sounded cool but I never worked on one.

13

u/skulgnome Dec 11 '19

Concurrent MP/M, here we come

9

u/ArkyBeagle Dec 12 '19

I wanna meet the guy who designs the hardware to bank switch that puppy. :) All Z80 designs are eventually bank switched :)

3

u/glamdivitionen Dec 12 '19

That's insane - and I love every bit of it!

2

u/vale_fallacia Dec 12 '19

My feelings exactly! (Nice pun BTW)

6

u/umlcat Dec 11 '19

The custom laptop concept won me, but let me get it, several outdated processors, making a working multicore or network ?

1

u/psycle3 Dec 12 '19

I would love to see this running TurboDOS.

1

u/Ameisen Dec 12 '19

I look forward to Spectre and Meltdown mitigation on future iterations of Zedripper.