LAUGHTON ELECTRONICS |
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This is the story of an extremely unusual microcomputer. An industry-standard CPU chip is enhanced by off chip circuitry — a coprocessor — that boosts the machine's capabilities into a different class. |
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| Introduction | ||||
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The new registers are shown in blue. |
This article
describes a computer which I built as a whimsical exercise in Computer
Science
and
as a commonplace tool for use in my lab. The article explains the
machine's capabilities and also the intriguing manner of their
implementation. The KimKlone uses a standard CPU chip retrofitted with
external logic, but it responds to the programmer just as aptly as a
redesign carried out at the silicon level. The KimKlone is a 65C02 computer endowed with a 16 Mbyte Address Space. Also featured is hardware acceleration for the Forth programming language, including a one-byte NEXT instruction and a new, stack-savvy addressing mode. The KimKlone represents an architectural extension of the 65C02. The programmer has access to new registers, and uses new instructions to take advantage of them. (See the programming model, left.) The new instructions aren't interrupts or traps to emulation routines. Nor are the new registers merely an over-glorified MMU (Memory Management Unit), the sort of thing that's inoperable except via peeking and poking with I/O accesses. The KimKlone actually has brand new instructions, to which the new registers implicitly respond. The novel instructions execute inline and at full speed. There are 44 new op-codes, all mapped into the Undefined spaces in the Rockwell 65C02 op-code map. (More on op-code mapping later.) Me and my KIMsThe machine's nickname, "KimKlone," makes reference to a less sophisticated rendition: my heavily reworked MOS Technology KIM-1 computer. Both machines include mutations of the classic Don Lancaster video interface; see Cheap Video à la Lancaster and The Back Story re: KIM-1 The KimKlone is a
fascinating device. If you find it a little "over the top," be
aware that
I too am amused by how it turned out. This lowly lab computer took on a
life of its own while it was still on the drawing board. |
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