Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 10:39:55 11/13/97
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On November 13, 1997 at 07:59:10, Graham Laight wrote: >Hello to everyone I met in Paris - it was a very enjoyable event to >visit - much more fun than a human chess tournament. Everyone was very >nice and pleasant, and very willing to discuss their programs and games >in progress. > >My question is, how do you go about writing a program for a dedicated >Chess Computer? > >I can't believe programmers use the machine code for the processor >they're working on. > >On the other hand, if you build the program on a PC in C, and then >compile it for the processor, I can foresee all sorts of problems: >things like architecure differences, amount of memory, control of LCDs >and LEDs, possible changes in hardware specifications by the >manufacturer, and so on. > >Let us in on the secrets, please. How is it done? No magic at all. Find out the specs for the hardware platform you are going to write for, what output ports you use to display data in the little LCD display, what you do to turn LED's on and off, what you do to detect when a piece has been moved, etc. Write the program in C, compile it, and then use a simple EPROM programmer to write the executable to an EPROM. Plug it in and go. If the hardware is changed later, modify the program, program a new EPROM for that version of the hardware. The only real issue here is that doing this makes you responsible for *everything*. IE you can't depend on the operating system for handling character-based interrupts and so forth, because you probably don't want to find an operating system that can live in EEPROM's and pay the royalty for that. So you end up doing your own raw I/O processing, but on a PC-type machine (X86, H8, 68K, etc) doing this is not difficult at all... I used to teach a course where kids had to put their programs into EEPROM and run them, because it takes some extra programming effort to make it work correctly...
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