The IBM 1410 FPGA project has reached a milestone. Console input of characters, word mark, space bar, index (force premature end of line) and the special inquiry keys: request, cancel and release is now complete.
With that it is possible to display memory, update memory, start execution at a specific address, start the machine, stop and machine, etc.
I have tried a few instructions in as simple way: Set Word Mark, Halt, Add, Subtract, Jump on Inquiry Request and Jump unconditionally, and they work OK for at least a very simple example.
With this, the implementation is very close to being in same state as a real IBM 1410 donated by Oscar Mayer that we played with in the basement of the University of Wisconsin Computer Science lab: CPU, console but no peripherals or I/O synchronizers.
There are some issues, though, both with the console implementation and with the FPGA implementation. For the FPGA
- The Console Check Test 3 fails to set the ADDRESS CHANNEL error. This is a “fight” between the DC Set which the switch activates, and another signal holding the trigger reset. (I think an earlier blog post discusses this in more detail).
- Attempts to display memory at 09998 show only two characters (this may or may not be correct), and attempts to display memory above 10000 fail miserably with a B Character Select error. This could be an issue of a gate being present that should not be, because I generally entered all gates using the IBM 1410 SMS application, even ones that I knew I would not want eventually, and/or a missing tie-down or tie-up of a signal. This is a critical problem to ferret out and fix. [Resolved 6/11/2023 – simply a matter of marking most of the gates for features “S10” (or $10 depending on where you look) and “S20” for “no generation”.]
- As mentioned in an earlier post, when starting a display memory sequence, during the first step – address entry – a “D” should be displayed. Instead an underlined (invalid parity) “F” is displayed because of a bit 2 “pick”. This looks to be an error in the actual ALD, will be easy to fix, but doesn’t really affect much of anything.
- An attempt to do output I/O to the console, using instruction M%T0aaaaaW does not operate properly — it repeats the first character in the I/O buffer at address “aaaaa” without end. This is also a critical problem, as diagnostics need to do this. [This has also been fixed as of 6/20/2022. It might have involved the change that *removed* a “D” flip flop after gate 3F.] [Update: This problem has also since been resolved.]
With the addition of the console, there are now three github projects involved with this effort:
- The SMS data gathering / entry / update application: https://github.com/cube1us/IBM1410SMS
- The FPGA itself – in VHDL: https://github.com/cube1us/IBM1410FPGA
- And now, the console/lights/switches (and, eventually, I/O device emulation) application: https://github.com/cube1us/IBM1410Console
The immediate activity, which may take a few weeks due to other commitments, will be to figure out what is going on with the console output issue.