14500 Board, how it works.

Interface

This is probably the interesting bit. The interface works through a dictionary which contains settings of the 'controls' (switches and LEDs), and automatically updates the dictionary or display.

Rather than copying umpteen objects, it uses an IOMarker which specifies detail, this expands at event 2. For each "bit" it requires, it creates an interface object which has different animations for different objects, and tells it whether it is input or output and which bit of which data item it is. 6 and 7 allow it to be labelled.

Events 8 through 10 copy data either to or from the interface object to the dictionary. Event 11 makes toggle switches work. Event 12 handles pushbuttons initialises pushbuttons and their labels - they do not have an entry in the dictionary, but call a function "On<actionName>" (this is done in 15).

Event 17 onwards is a short cut. Data is stored in a 256 x 4 bit memory on this machine, and this allows code to be typed in by pressing 0-9A-F which writes it to the current memory and bumps the program counter - otherwise you'd have to set the switches, press load data, and press single step - this does it for you - you can type 0 A 9 F C 3 etc. to load a program in.

InterfaceRefresh

This is related to interface but it copies data from the emulation globals into the interface dictionary - then they are updated to the display by the code in interface. These are the current address in the program counter (8 + 1 + 1) LEDs, the data at that location (4), the Result Register (14500 Accumulator) (1), the 16 output latches (16 LEDs) in 3 to 6). Event 7 maintains the state of the step/run switch in a global for convenience.

Event 8 is added to make things easier - it displays the mnemonic equivalent of the code in data memory, rather than having to read binary.

Commands

These handle the push buttons, they are all "OnXXX" functions. LoadPC copies the address switches into the program counter, Reset resets the program counter, the 14500 MCU and the run latch, Single step executes a single half-instruction (see emulation), Load Data loads the data switches into memory, and OnRunMode starts the program running by setting the run latch. Finally event 8 causes the emulation to free run at one half-instruction per tick if the run latch is set.


Emulation

This is a classic emulation of the MCU, with one tweak. Each single step is a half instruction - for even address instructions (opcode) it loads the opcode into an internal latch (Event 3), and on odd ones, it loads the operand (IO Address) into an external latch (Event 4) - so it requires two single steps to execute each instruction.

The emulations follow the 14500 Specification, except NOP0 (0000) resets the run latch and NOPF (1111) presets the program counter, loading the address switches into the program counter.

A couple of helper functions read input (Starting at 23) - this supports the "wiring" of input pin 15 to the RR (25) and input pins 8-14 to their corresponding output latches (26), these can be then used as data storage. This is my own addition, as it is not fixed on the original board but done by wiring.