@typhlosion it's so... *wipes a tear* beautiful
@Fuego it'd be nice if i could have an assembler do this work for me buuuuuuuut
i'll save that til i actually have the whole processor implemented
@typhlosion is that like a risc-16 reference CPU?
@Fuego it's a processor i designed for a fantasy console i'd like to develop, kinda like a more grounded pico-8 (by which i mean i'm approaching the design as though i'm developing a real console, even though it'll almost certainly only ever be an emulator)
@typhlosion yay bank switching. I started a NES emulator with rewind and symbolic execution not too long ago
@Fuego keep in mind i never claimed this to be a *good* design
@typhlosion with that and a more reasonable set of PPU restrictions it can't be worse than pico-8. Will you multithread it and have the PPU act as another pseudoprocessor or just intersperse it? And do they have the same speed? And do mem read writes take extra cycles?
@Fuego it's like MIPS, where all the instructions take the same number of cycles
and yeah, I want to experiment with running the PPU and other coprocessors and such in different threads (doing interrupts with message passing) rather than doing cycle counting stuff, so i can have more freedom to have other hardware operate maybe at different speeds
@typhlosion I feel like the PPU and sound chip are where a system gets its real personality.
@Fuego oh, for sure - like how the SNES and C64 both used the 6502 but were otherwise totally different mainly because of those aspects (also the memory mapping in general)
@Fuego oops i meant NES, i know what i'm talking about, i promise
@Fuego the bank switching is there because the processor is 16-bit but with 32-bit addressing and the bank register is where the high 16 bits come from in most cases where you're accessing memory