This week Jonathan and Aaron chat with Piers Finlayson about One ROM! Why does the retro-computing world need a solution for replacement ROMs? How difficult was it to squeeze a MCU and layout into the original ROM footprint? And what’s next for the project? Listen to find out!
- https://piers.rocks/
- https://onerom.org/
- https://github.com/piersfinlayson/one-rom
- https://github.com/piersfinlayson/airfrog
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If you’d rather read along, here’s the transcript for this week’s episode.
Theme music: “Newer Wave” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
I’m 100% with Piers when it comes to Python. I’ve been a hardware designer and C coder for decades, and I thought that it might be easier to use C just for functions that had to go FAST, and Python for more overall application structure and user interface stuff, but what I discovered very quickly was that in Python it took a lot more work to completely test things, because it doesn’t do much checking of your code before blessing it and starting to run, so in order to test every statement you have to develop tests that exercise every possible execution path. So even for tasks that I once thought should be easier to do in a higher-level interpreter, I’ve gone back to using C. My modify-test-run cycle is actually faster in C than in Python. I’m reluctant to try Rust just because I’m not sure what the advantage would be, but what I’m finding is that I’d much rather be told that I’m doing something stupid rather than having to find out only because I’m leaking memory. So maybe I’ll take some steps in that direction.
I could have learned this in the late 1980s, when I was working at a workstation computer manufacturer. There I was a product support engineer, which meant that I had to develop installation and testing procedures to ensure that products were maintainable. I worked with one software engineer who wrote literally everything in C, including installation and configuration scripts. I didn’t get it at the time, but now I think I do.
Aaron: I’ll second your recommendation for the Ben Eater videos, especially for those in which he was leading us through the development of a simple CPU. But even the newer 6502-centered videos always teach me something new.