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   Techokami (techokami@woof.tech)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 10:29:10 JST Techokami

   in reply to

   Okay, so, while we're thinking over the GPU side of things, there's a bigger issue that I will need some assistance and ideas for: actually making code to run on this platform.

   The idea I have is that there will be two main ways of creating software: interpreted code and machine code. The former would make the platform feel like other fantasy computers (like PICO-8 and TIC-80), while the latter will actually take full advantage of the i960 CPU. But we need to solve the latter before we can tackle the former.

   So the first big question is: what is available for i960 assemblers? GAS used to support i960, but it was ripped out at some point? Documentation is very unclear about which platforms are currently supported. Intel had an official assembler and I think it's here: https://github.com/biggestsonicfan/i960-CTOOLS-with-NINDY I can't seem to figure out if LLVM supports i960, the documentation on supported target architectures is missing. And there is a product by Archelon that costs ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS PER PERSON.

   With an assembler, other languages should then be able to be supported, like C. If LLVM actually does support the i960, then Rust would also be an option for those that want it.

   Once we have all THAT sorted, then the focus can move on to the interpreted language. BASIC is a period-correct option, but I have a feeling that most people would prefer something like Lua or maybe even Python instead. But it is hard to figure out what to use when we lack the ability to assemble code in the first place!