There exist so-called "bit-slice" processor chips, which are
essentially a slice, typically 4 or 8 bits wide, through a
register set, ALU and associated logic. The idea is that
you put together enough slices to get the word length you
want, together with some ROM for microcode and a few other
bits and pieces, and build yourself a processor. It would
probably be feasible to build a hardware Z-machine this
way.
I might even be crazy enough to try this myself...
|> 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.
You could probably microcode the Z-machine I/O instructions
if you made the microcode flexible enough. Alternatively,
you could invent some new, lower-level I/O primitives and
treat the official I/O instructions as "system calls" which
trap to a piece of Z-code (perhaps in a different address
space) which do the operation using the real primitives.
Hmmm... writing an operating system in Inform would be an
interesting exercise...
|> Matthew McDonald mafm@cs.uwa.edu.au
Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, +--------------------------------------+
University of Canterbury, | A citizen of NewZealandCorp, a |
Christchurch, New Zealand | wholly-owned subsidiary of Japan Inc.|
greg@cosc.canterbury.ac.nz +--------------------------------------+