Building a comprehensive ISA test suite for the Sampo 16-bit RISC CPU and running all 132 tests on the ULX3S FPGA with zero failures - after finding a pipeline hazard bug and a devious address-shifting patch bug along the way.
The final chapter: getting CP/M to boot correctly on the Arduino Giga R1 WiFi with a RetroShield Z80, debugging the "Bad load" error, achieving a 75x performance speedup through GPIO optimization, and playing Zork I on real Z80 hardware over WiFi.
How Lattice treats mutability as a runtime-observable, constrainable, and reactive property — moving beyond const/let into a full lifecycle system for data state.
Porting CP/M 2.2 from an Arduino Mega to the Giga R1 WiFi turned into a deep dive on TXB0108 level converter failures, shadow register tracking, and building a Rust sector server for WiFi-based disk I/O.
Comprehensive review and benchmark analysis of the Milk-V Mars, a RISC-V single board computer powered by the StarFive JH7110 SoC with four SiFive U74-MC cores and 8GB RAM. Rust compilation benchmarks reveal it's the slowest board in our test fleet at 936 seconds average, but the board tells an important story about RISC-V's current state and the architectural diversity emerging in the SBC market.
An introduction to Lattice, a new programming language built around a novel crystallization-based phase system for managing mutability and memory. This post explores how Lattice's flux/fix/freeze/thaw/forge model differs from existing approaches like Rust's ownership, garbage collection, and traditional immutability, and why treating variable mutability as a physical phase transition leads to clearer, safer programs.
A tiny C compiler written entirely in Z80 assembly that reads source code over serial and generates executable Z80 machine code, inspired by SectorC's 512-byte x86-16 compiler.
A comprehensive review of "Getting Started with FPGAs: Digital Circuit Design, Verilog, and VHDL for Beginners" by Russell Merrick, published by No Starch Press. This book provides an accessible on-ramp to field programmable gate array development, covering Boolean algebra, flip-flops, simulation, state machines, FPGA primitives, binary math, and I/O through hands-on projects targeting Lattice iCE40 hardware. Merrick's dual-language approach presenting every code example in both Verilog and VHDL, combined with his years of educational content creation at nandland.com, produces a uniquely approachable beginner text that demystifies the parallel-thinking paradigm shift required for hardware description.
There are multiple ways to get Rust running on custom or retro CPUs. This article explores three approaches—full LLVM backends, Rust-to-C transpilation via Eurydice, and manual no_std FFI—with a practical walkthrough of transpiling Rust to C and compiling it for the Z80 with SDCC.
A review of William Barden Jr.'s 1978 classic "The Z-80 Microcomputer Handbook" - a comprehensive technical reference that covered hardware, software, and complete microcomputer systems built around Zilog's iconic Z80 processor.
