Re: This is probably a stupid question, but...


29 Jun 1995 05:05:57 GMT

"Andrew C. Plotkin" <erkyrath+@CMU.EDU> writes:

Good god, there's no *conceivable* reason why. That's why I'd insist
on doing it in hardware, etched chips and all.

I don't know that I'd want to build a chip, although I might if I had
access to the stuff required. I might be inclined to try to build the
processor out of a bunch of PALs. Alternatively, is it possible to get
micro-codable processors?

I'd also insist on a fully-functional game-playing machine, which
means it'd have to include a display and keyboard.

I'd suggest building something (at least initially) that sat on a PC
bus or a serial line and used the PC for I/O. The game binary could
then be down-loaded to the z-machine, like a DSP card.

Surely the point of the doing all this would be to build a z-machine
in hardware. Presumably the I/O stuff can't be written in raw
z-machine code anyway, and so has to be done in hardware or using
another processor anyway.

--
	Matthew McDonald mafm@cs.uwa.edu.au
They are ill discoverers that think there is no land when they can
see nothing but sea. -- Francis Bacon