A blit cost ten cycles, which were the five port writes that set it up. The
quarter of a kilobyte that moved cost nothing, and no hardware moves a quarter
of a kilobyte for nothing.
BANKS ARE SEPARATE MEMORIES, AND THAT IS WHAT SETS THE RATE. A move between two
of them can overlap its read and its write - fetch the next byte while the last
one is stored - so it settles at a byte a cycle. A move within one bank cannot,
and costs two. A fill has nothing to read and costs one whatever the banks are.
The odd cycle on each is the pipeline filling.
That is not a modelling choice so much as a reading of the structure the machine
already has: a Program to Data blit is inherently twice the rate of a Data to
Data one, and it is legible why.
Measured: 256 bytes is 297 cycles across banks and 518 within one, both
including the instructions that ask for it.
WHAT IT TAUGHT, which was not what I expected. Charging for movement costs the
native assembler 0.4 per cent and costs directory work 13.4. The assembler reads
a block and then thinks about it for a long time, so the move is amortised into
nothing; the filesystem reads a block in order to look at it and does nothing
else in between.
So the case for a blitter that runs alongside the CPU is weaker than it sounds.
Concurrency pays when there is other work to do during the transfer, and the
place that spends its time moving memory is exactly the place with nothing else
to do - it blits a block precisely so that it can read it. What that workload
wants is a FASTER controller, not a concurrent one: a wider data path halves the
wait, and the machine is waiting either way.
Video is the case that would still want concurrency, since a frame can be moved
while the next one is worked out. That is an argument about software nobody has
written yet, and it is now an argument with numbers on the other side of it.
The byte at a time port is charged too, for the byte it moves beyond reaching
the port. Nothing polls CTRL_STATUS, so the transfer stalls whoever asked for
it, which is the conservative reading and the one the software already assumes.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
cycleCount used to tick once per instruction, so RSTA cost what SETD cost and a
CALL moving ten bytes of Stack cost what a branch cost. No machine anybody could
build works that way, and the emulator's job is to be the thing the hardware is
designed against.
Every touch of memory now goes through one of four accessors that charge for it:
fetching an opcode, fetching the bytes after it, reading or writing Data Memory,
and reaching a device port. One access, one cycle, nothing overlapped. The
accessors exist so the cost is counted where the access happens rather than in a
table of per instruction costs kept somewhere else - a table like that is a
second copy of what the code does, and the two drift.
The run loop spends a budget of cycles instead of running a count of
instructions, so the emulated rate means something: an instruction costs what it
touches, and a batch ends when the cycles are gone.
What the numbers say now: RSTA 1 and SETD 4, being one byte and four. LDA 3,
DPUA 2. CALL and RET together 24, RCAL and RRET together 8, because the first
pair moves twenty bytes of Stack and the second moves four. The average SplitBit
instruction costs 3.72 of these, measured over the native assembler assembling a
program.
And the measurement that prompted all of this: converting the filesystem's
hottest leaf routine to RCAL is 3.1 per cent cheaper on a directory heavy
workload. The old model said 0.0, which is what a model that cannot see memory
traffic must say about a change that is nothing else.
Three tests moved. settle() strips the cycle count from recorded output, so
nothing should have churned - but it was anchored to the start of a line and
replCalculator's last output has no newline on it, which leaves the halt message
mid line where the pattern never reached. Not anchored any more.
The two Life programs are bounded by a cycle count because they never end, and
that number was rescaled from 3,000,000 to 11,200,000 - the same amount of work
at 3.72 cycles to the instruction. Nothing about either program changed. No limit
reproduces the old output exactly, because the cut now lands elsewhere in a
frame, so they are recorded again rather than tuned to match.
Whether hardware overlaps a fetch with the end of the previous instruction is
left open on purpose. This is the conservative model; pipelining is a decision to
make while drawing the hardware, not one to inherit from an emulator.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
-S writes every label and the address it was given, in address order.
Nothing else knows that. A program on the disk is bytes; the monitor can
disassemble it but has no idea what any of it is called. So counting which
addresses a program calls says a great deal and names nothing - the answer
arrives as a column of numbers and somebody works out by hand which routine
each one is inside.
It was deferred when the native assembler was planned, as a listing and symbol
dump nobody needed yet. Finding out where the assembler spends its time is what
needed it: the top six call targets were addresses until this existed and are
numStep, numCompare, tokGet, srcNext, numAddByte and clsSameName with it.
Sorted by address rather than by name, because the question asked of it is
always "what is at this address".
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
The six settled back on the twenty fourth, built now.
RCAL and RRET are a call that puts nothing back. CALL restores A, B and Data
Pointers 0 through 2, which costs ten bytes of Stack and is why a subroutine
here can only hand anything back through Q, DP3 or memory. RCAL costs two and
restores nothing, which is what a short leaf routine wants and is unsafe in
exactly the way the name says.
They are a pair because the frames are different sizes: returning from one
through the other walks the Stack to somewhere that was never a return address.
That was the user's correction to the original proposal, which had a raw call
and no raw return.
DPUA and DPDA offset a Data Pointer by A; DPUW and DPDW by A and B together,
most significant first. DPUP and DPDN take a byte written into the program, so
moving a pointer by something just worked out meant storing it and loading it
back. Down as well as up on symmetry grounds, which was also the user's call -
the argument against it came from counting uses in a corpus written under the
constraint.
The opcodes sit where they belong: 0x16 and 0x1E immediately below CALL and RET,
and 0x4E through 0x51 at the end of the Data Pointer family. All six fit shapes
that already existed, so instructiontable.py needed only set membership and both
machine side copies of the table regenerated from it unchanged.
Checked at every level it exists at: the emulator runs them, the host assembler
encodes them, the monitor disassembles all six with the right lengths, and the
assembler that runs on the machine builds a program using them byte for byte
identically to the host - and that program runs.
The recorded test measures what the two calls COST as well as what they put
back, because an RCAL that quietly did what CALL does would still return to the
right place. It does not survive that: returned through RRET, it hangs.
docs.sh can read a two word number now. The count of instructions taking a Data
Pointer went past twenty, and the pattern only allowed one word, so the check
would have reported that the manual had stopped saying it rather than that the
number was wrong.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
SBFS version two adds directories out of space each entry had already set
aside: two of the four reserved bytes become a parent, and one of the seven
spare flag bits says an entry is a directory. The entry is still thirty two
bytes, so it still divides two hundred and fifty six and still never straddles
a block, and nothing in the block layer knows anything happened.
A directory is an entry with no blocks. That is what keeps the flat array of
entries the whole allocation map, which is the property the format is built
on: with files laid down contiguously, every block is inside some entry's
range or it is not, and an entry with no range is in nobody's way. There is
still no allocation table to consult and none to keep right.
THE PARENT IS AN INDEX PLUS ONE, so zero means the root. A version one disk has
zeroes in those bytes, and "in the root" is exactly where every file on a flat
disk is - so a version one image is already a valid version two image, with
nothing to convert and no tool to convert it with.
A disk is at the lowest version that describes what is on it. format makes a
version one disk and mkdir is what raises it, so everything built here stays
readable by a reader that has never heard of a directory right up until it
really does have one. That is what lets this land before the machine knows
anything: the whole existing suite passes untouched.
The tool gains mkdir and rmdir, and list, put, get and delete take paths. list
also now reports entries used against entries available, because a disk has two
ceilings and the entry one is the one nobody notices until it bites.
rmdir refuses a directory with anything in it, and that is not politeness:
parents are entry indices, a freed index gets handed out again, and the
children of a removed directory would reappear inside whatever took its place.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
It always wrote .bin, whatever it had built. So assembling a loadable
program without -o produced Say.bin containing SBEX - a boot image name on a
file the machine cannot boot, in a repository whose whole convention is that
a .bin is started from and a .sbx is loaded.
Successfully wrote SplitBit boot image to "hello.bin".
Successfully wrote SplitBit loadable program to "Say.sbx".
programIsLoadable() already existed and is already what decides which
writer runs; the name now asks it too. Nothing in the build depended on the
old behaviour, because everything that assembles anything passes -o.
THE ASSEMBLER THAT RUNS ON SPLITBIT ALREADY DID IT THIS WAY. Two assemblers
naming their output differently from the same source is exactly the kind of
difference that wastes an afternoon, and the newer one was right.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
"Binary" was doing three jobs. It meant an SPBT file that the machine starts
from; it meant whatever the assembler happened to produce, which is now
either that or a loadable program; and it meant a compiled host tool. A word
that means three things means none of them, and the first of the three has a
name already - this project has been calling them boot images for a while
and the manuals had not caught up.
Where it means an SPBT file -> boot image
Where it means either output -> output
Where it means a host executable -> left alone
Where it means base two -> left alone
The user facing messages move with it:
Error: No boot image specified.
Usage: ./SplitBit [OPTIONS] <boot image>
Error: This is not a SplitBit boot image.
Error: This boot image is in format version 2, and this emulator reads 1.
Successfully wrote SplitBit boot image to "hello.bin".
The assembler's own help was the interesting case. Its -o writes either
format, so "the binary" there was never right - it is "the output" now, and
the message that names the format is the one that says which it wrote.
No recorded output contained the word, so nothing needed re-blessing.
Checked before starting rather than after.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
The quotes are gone by the time a token is classified, so checkIfKeyword's
test of token[0] == '#' matched the STRING "#Program" sitting in a program's
Data Segment. It was read as the directive: the segment silently changed in
the middle of the data, the string's nine bytes were charged to the Program
cursor instead of the Data one, and every label defined after it came out
nine bytes wrong - in a file that still had a valid header, a plausible
length, and nothing to say about any of it. The only symptom was a program
that jumped into the middle of an instruction.
This is the FOURTH of the family. A string spelling a mnemonic assembled as
that instruction; a string beginning with a zero was rejected as a malformed
literal; a string in the Program Segment was discarded in silence. The
instruction check and the literal check both carry a "not a STRING" guard
already. This one did not, so it has one now, and it lives inside
checkIfKeyword rather than at the call site so it cannot be left off again.
Nothing had ever triggered it, because nothing had ever needed a directive's
name as data. An assembler written FOR this machine necessarily does: it has
to compare tokens against "#Program" and "#Data". It was found by building
one and watching it fault on its second instruction.
Test stringKeyword puts every directive name in a program's data and prints
a label defined after them. Verified that it bites: without the fix the
assembler refuses the file outright.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
A token is classified after its quotes have been stripped, so a string
literal reading "ADD" looked exactly like the ADD instruction and was
assembled as one. It failed with "attempting to assemble outside the
Program Segment", a message about a mistake nobody had made.
The literal and label checks were already guarded against strings and the
instruction check was not. Mnemonics match without regard to case, so
"or" and "and" were caught by this too, and those are ordinary enough
words to want in a message.
Third of its family, after a string beginning with '0' being read as a
malformed number and a string in the Program Segment being silently
discarded. All three have the same root.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The loadable program format's header has been in the working tree since
the loader was written and has never been in the repository: the gitignore
rules matched Source/Assembler as a directory, so it was silently
untracked. Anything cloning this repository could not build it, because
secondPass.c includes this file.
This is the failure the previous commit describes, having already happened
once without being noticed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Overflowing/Underflowing A or B with increment or decrement instructions now sets the Carry Flag.
An increment or decrement of A or B that doesn't result in an overflow/underflow now clears the Carry Flag.
Q is no longer saved and restored in subroutine calls, allowing it to be used to return a one byte result.
Documentation updated with more detail.
Added DPUP and DPDN, which take a one byte operand specifying how far up or down to offset the Data Pointer.
Three Fibonacci generators using the print.asm library.
- 8 bit values printing in decimal representation.
- 16 bit values printing in hexadecimal representation.
- 32 bit values printing in hexadecimal representation.
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5
Anachronaut