EDUC-8 Project

[teenix]

Hi all,

Still trying to fill in time in the Tanami desert.

In addition to the normal mode of operation, I have added more memory and a new instruction set to the EDUC-8 project giving it a "What If..." mode of operation. Sort of "what if way back then it had..."

In keeping with the 70's era (a bit) it is still not high performance, but it allows much more flexibility for the project with 1K of 16 bit memory, 64 bytes of RAM and 8 bytes of EEPROM, plus 54 new instructions.

The original author mentioned he wanted to create a calculator program for the EDUC-8 but with the 256 byte memory and limited instruction set, that would be a perplexing task to say the least.

I did manage to create a calculator program using the new mode and its operation is based on the HP45 math routines. I scavenged through the code from this calculator and after sorting it out, there were 85 lines of code that do the basic 4 math functions including preformatting of the input data keyed in by the user.

The EDUC 8 instruction clock is way slower than the HP45 so the operation is a bit slow, mainly with divide, but it works ok. The display is scaled down to 8 digits but internally the math is 9.9999999 E+/-99.

I haven't released the new project yet as I am still finding the odd bug in the computer, and the hardware still needs some tweaking but will soon.

cheers

Tony