NOVA64

noVa64 development diary
65816 16-BIT LAPTOP OPEN SOURCE · GNU V3 5 ENTRIES
T

TRACKS

noVa64

The diary runs on two axes. A track says which part of the machine an entry is about — one per entry, and they are meant to be few enough, and separate enough, that filing an entry is never a judgement call. A series says in what order a run of entries is read. Most entries have a track and no series.

BY TRACK
AR Architecture
The shape of the machine as a whole — block diagram, buses, and how the parts meet.
1
PO Power
Batteries, regulation and the power button — keeping a laptop alive off a cell.
0
CP CPU
The 65816 itself — bring-up, clocking, bus behaviour, the prototype board.
0
ME Memory
DRAM, SRAM and cache, and the MMU that maps them into the CPU's 24-bit space.
0
VI Video
The video processor, its own memory, and everything on the path to the panel.
0
AU Audio
Sound generation and the path from the machine to a speaker.
0
HI HID
Keyboard, pointing and the serial console — how a human reaches the machine.
0
ST Storage
The medium and the filesystem written on it — on-disk format, allocation, drivers.
0
FW Firmware
What runs before the OS — the bootloader, the BIOS, the ROM the FPGA lifts into RAM.
0
SY System
The operating system proper — kernel, scheduling, memory management, the hardware API.
0
GE General
Plans, detours, and the entries that are about the project rather than a part of it.
4