So many wonderful computer things in 2023!

on


As the year draws to an end, it is time for reflection, review, and planning next year's endeavours. This has been a wonderfully productive and fulfilling year for me at all levels, including at The Byte Attic™.

Exactly one year ago, in December of 2022, I was far along enough with the Talos ES™ design that I knew clearly what I still had to do, how to do it, and that it would work. Different people react differently to this moment. Some feel relieved and only then begin to really enjoy what they're doing. I, however, tend to have a paradoxical reaction: I somewhat lose interest the moment I know that the key problems are sorted. And so I began 2023 by putting Talos ES™ to the side and setting myself a new challenge: to make a highly optimised, enhanced, SMD version of my old CERBERUS 2080™ computer.


And that I did. Not only is the new CERBERUS 2100™ smaller and much cheaper, but it also has new capabilities: an expansion port and interface capable of Direct Memory Access (DMA), which allows for even more processors to be added to the system; a more flexible video circuit that gives the user the possibility to experiment with new functionality by reprogramming the CPLDs in-system; colour capabilities; an integrated uSD card port; and a more powerful and flexible I/O controller.


Several weeks ago, the IEEE Spectrum magazine published a piece covering CERBERUS 2100™ and its educational potential. The piece shows how CERBERUS provides a concrete, working, useful example of a multi-processor system that users can rewire at the hardware-level. This has obvious applications in academia, as there aren't many complete computer systems out there with an open and flexible design down to the individual gate and flip-flop; let alone one that supports multiple CPUs and DMA expansion.

And to fully enable the potential of the system, I can share with you now that Olimex will be selling ready-to-use CERBERUS 2100™ units from early 2024! Therefore, soon you will no longer need to make your own. The IEEE Spectrum should also soon be publishing a note on the commercial availability of the system, so faculty worldwide is made aware of it.

My publication on the IEEE Spectrum was the second event in the year that made the teenager inside me smile in giddy delight. Indeed, I had just turned 17 when I went to computer engineering school, and soon the IEEE Spectrum would become a mythical publication to me: the place where the gods of computer engineering published ideas almost beyond my comprehension at the time. When that teenager—still alive in me—now looks at his own piece, featuring his own computer, on the pages of the IEEE Spectrum, his head almost bursts like those of the aliens in Mars Attacks!



But as I said, this was the second event of the year that made the kid in me all giddy. The first was even more special! That happened when Heber Ltd. expressed interest in producing and selling a video games console based on my Agon light™ platform. I enthusiastically jumped in to support them, for it blew the mind of the kid inside me that I'd get a chance to design my own video games console, and see it commercialised as a real product!

Working with Richard and Heber was pure delight. We saw eye-to-eye on everything, from the get-go. I was sensitive to Heber's need to have an economically viable design, as this would be a serious product for them. They have salaries and suppliers to pay, while I was just having fun. Yet, to my surprise, Richard never asked me to compromise on quality or design principles. He did have preferred suppliers for certain parts, but often his preferences entailed higher-quality, more expensive parts than the ones I had originally used. There are no knock-off Chinese parts in Agon Console8™ and the whole thing is manufactured locally in the UK. The board exudes quality, as you can see in the photos.


As a little anecdote, it was Richard who asked me to add in-series termination resistors to the I2C lines in Agon Console8™. It was the first time in my design experience that the business guy goes further in his commitment to quality and design principles than the engineer doing work that makes him proud. Indeed, I am not sure how Heber can sell Agon Console8™ units at the price levels they do; maybe they have some subsidy from government, as the platform is overtly educative (I don't know, and never asked).



As if all this weren't enough, working on Agon Console8™ led me to myriad optimisations of the original Agon light™ design. I decided then that it would be a pity not to apply those optimisations to the rest of the Agon family. And so Agon light ORIGINS edition™ was born. It is a highly refined version of the Agon design, polished like a diamond, both electrically and aesthetically. I discussed these optimisations in an earlier post. The result is a premium, proudly over-engineered product meant for the discerning hobbyist or student. Olimex has also risen to the challenge and is now offering ready-to-use ORIGINS edition units worldwide!


I could not have imagined a greater reward for my efforts with Agon Console8™ and Agon ORIGINS edition™ than to see software legends in this industry, such as Lemmings and Grand Theft Auto creator Mike Dailly, as well as Elite - The New Kind creator Christian Pinder, porting their creations to the Agon platform. To have created hardware touched by these living legends is an amazing feeling. The kid inside me can hardly believe it.




With CERBERUS 2100™, Agon Console8™ and Agon light ORIGINS edition™ completed (not launched yet, but effectively done on my side), and after a brief return to Talos ES™ in the spring, I turned my attention to what would turn out to be two laborious restorations: a SOL-20 (the world's first home computer) and a DAI PC (Belgium's first home computer), both extraordinarily rare these days. The former went to the Dutch Home Computer Museum and the latter to the Belgian NAM-IP Museum. I am particularly delighted to have enabled the NAM-IP Museum to demonstrate to its visitors, for the first time, what ought to be the pride of early Belgian computer engineering. It's hard to describe the sense of fulfilment—of having paid my respects and done honour to my predecessors—that accompanied the completion of these two restorations.


And then I finally had both the time and the interest to return to Talos ES™ so to complete it once and for all. I did it in one final push, in which I revised the instruction set, fixed a remaining hardware bug, finished the BIOS/monitor/assembler, and wrote some mathematical applications for it. The end result was above my expectations, as the system proved remarkably stable and fast, both in terms of clock speed and—most importantly—the number of cycles required per application.


Indeed, Talos ES™ proved itself not only capable of executing 5 (!) parallel operations every cycle in principle, but it could actually do it in practice, for real-life applications. For a machine with 8-bit instructions this is rather unique. Most, if not all, VLIW and Superscalar processors use at least 64-bit instructions to encode all the instruction-level parallelism. Moreover, Talos ES™ is a pipelined RISC machine, so it really does execute 5 operations every clock cycle, not just every execution cycle. I am not sure whether this has any precedent in the world of 8-bit CPUs and microcontrollers, which is the reason why I am now contemplating more ambitious goals for the design.


I am currently busy with designing an SMD version of Talos. This will not only reduce the cost of the design, but also allow the user to observe all of its states at a glance, on one single board.

In addition to developments around the Talos CPU™, there is one pressing priority for 2024: the highest-stakes restoration I probably will ever carry out; that of a Q1 computer, one of only five known surviving units of the world's first true microcomputer (i.e. a computer using an integrated microprocessor as CPU). It doesn't get any bigger than this for a conservator, so for the first time my confidence may be tested. Let's hope for the best. For if everything does go well, you will soon be able to see the unit proudly displayed at the Dutch Home Computer Museum.


I very much look forward to 2024, and I hope to count on your company for the coming journey. For now, I wish you a very merry Christmas and a wonderful, peaceful start of our brand new turn around the Sun.