now then let’s poke through the transputer C compiler manual to figure out how to make it do thing
it’s from 1992 so it’s ANSI C, plus INMOS specific concurrency and threading extensions along with headers for interacting with the system links
it supports a lot of host systems too
The host PC runs a program called ISERVER which provides host services to the transputer, so it can read and write main memory. This will come in handy if I want to draw a cube
So if I want to, say, offload polygon transforms from my CPU, I would need to write a kernel that reads a list of vertices from shared memory and writes the transformed vertices to another buffer. Then I could pass those vertices to my Trio64.
This is obviously not something you need to do on a Pentium 200. But I’ve got a PC/AT and an ISA video card…
(Interestingly there WAS a TRAM with XGA video capability, which would be hardware-accelerated 2D operations)
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Fortunately, we have a pretty small instruction set that looks like it’s easy to break down. If you treat opcodes as 3 octal digits (0NN, NNN, NNN) it looks like it makes more sense.
eg the “do something to A” opcodes are 10AAABBB with A being the operation and B being the source, while the version that takes an Immediate is 11AAA110
the real version of this is at my dad's house somewhere needing a new power jack soldered in lol
it was my dad's band's and ended up my first keyboard
yeah, it looks like a toy and the presets are awful. but it has a unique sound and you can get some POWERFUL sounds out of it with the right programming (and some simple effects)
I need to try a different BeOS keyboard driver but I... can't... rename mine... without a keyboard...
I'm not sure why the USB keyboard doesn't work either considering it's got UHCI support and the keyboard definitely supports UHCI (it works in Windows 98 with a generic HID driver)
I did figure out BeOS assigned the USB controller and NIC to the same IRQ?