Day-time software engineer and part-time musician, [Logickin,] knows a thing or two about programming the SunVox modular synthesiser and tracker software. Whilst the software is normally used for creating music and sound effects, they decided to really push it, and create the VOXCOM-1610, a functional turing-complete CPU inside SunVox, just for fun.
For those who haven’t come across SunVox before now, this software is a highly programmable visual environment for building up custom synthesisers, piecing signals together to create rhythms — that’s the ‘tracker’ bit — as well as interfacing to input devices such as MIDI and many others. It does look like a lot of fun, but just like CPUs created in Minecraft, just because, this seems to be the first time someone has built one inside this particular music app. The VOXCOM 1610 is a fully functional 10 Hz, 16-bit computer. It boasts 2KB of ROM, 256 bytes of RAM (expandable to 128 KB), and 8 general registers for data exchange between components. If you don’t fancy manually poking bits into the ROM to enter your software, then you’re in luck as [Logickin] has provided an assembler (in Java) that should ease the process a lot. The ABI will look very familiar to anyone who’s ever touched assembler before, although as you’d expect, it is quite light on addressing modes.
Now, all that is needed is for someone to port Doom to this and we’ll have it all. We think that is unlikely to happen. For those who pay attention, we did see one neat SunVox project in the past, which is certainly eye-catching as well as eardrum-bursting.
Thanks to [elbien] for the tip!
How is “turning complete” different from Turing Complete? B^)
I’m assuming it’s another example of auto-correct that isn’t. And proof-reading that’s more like proof-glancing…
It’s also proof the article wasn’t written by an AI.
Not really, you could simply add to the initial prompt something like “Please include the occasional grammar or spelling mistake in your article.”
“To program the machine, you can either using a lookup table and manually writing into the ROM, but that is time consuming and unreliable.”
It’d be interesting to be able to write to ROM via some kind of input latch logic on the keyboard (the musical kind). This would be harder as this is a 16-bit computer. This would make for a demanding, and boring to witness, form of practice, with an externally enforced requirement for perfection. I imagine spending 30 min a day musically programming snake would be an interesting practice exercise for some.
I think so eone should write a tracking modular synth on this new cpu
Who will waggle K-9’s tail afterwards.