Author: Graham Laight
Date: 01:18:03 11/14/97
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On November 13, 1997 at 13:39:55, Robert Hyatt wrote: >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... Bob, thankyou for this interesting article. Graham
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