Gen 1: a retrospective

SBTCVM. Its hard to believe that mark 2 was first committed to GitHub over a year ago, but its true. In fact, SBTCVM has been in development for over 2 years. So, in light of Gen 1's codebase being retired, lets take a look at its history.


Just a quick look at Wikipedia.
The origin of mark 2 actually traces back to me going to look up something on Wikipedia, and getting lost in the maze of related articles until i stumbled across "balanced ternary".

calculations operational, sir.
On June 3rd 2016, A curious little python program poped up on github.
Its name, was BalTCalc of course. and as you might guess, its a calculator, that works in balanced ternary. This calculator needed some backend code, so i wrote libbaltcalc to go along with it. Little did i know, that one library would lead me to starting a certain project.

Demo ahoy!
September 24th 2016. I had been coding away at a rather alien project for myself, a virtual computer of sorts. TDA was just as its acronym suggests, Ternary, and a Demonstration of a computer Architecture. The code was buggy, slow, and didn't even have memory writes. but It did one thing: Show that i actually could simulate a balanced ternary computer in python, and prove libbaltcalc was indeed capable of such. Its worth noting, that what is now SBTCVM's assembler was begun partway through TDA's development because of me growing sick and tired of base 3 machine code programming.

Specs:
x6 729 word (6trit) memory banks (roughly 4KT)
x1 729 word IObus
4trit instruction set

SBTCVM is born
March 9th, 2017. SBTCVM Mark 1.1 didn't change too much of TDA's code, but it did have some important improvements, most notably address calculation in SBTCVM's assembler. Mark 1.1 was also a stepping stone for a much more capable VM.

19,683. 
March 17, 2017. SBTCVM Mark 2 makes its presence known.
with a whopping 162 KT of combined memory. (108KT of unbroken trytes) Mark 2 is vastly superior to the Mark 1.x machines, and a worthy holder of Gen 1's final form. It introduced features that made SBTCVM vastly more useful in studying balanced ternary computing.

For one, it was the first to include a graphical calculator, the first to include framebuffered graphics, and even the first to reproduce digital sampled audio. Mark 2's set of utilities did balloon out of control in hindsight, but now we know better what tools are actually needed. and what aren't. the calculator is always handy for a quick bit of calculation after all. and yes i still have 19,683 stuck in my head. :)

Specs:
162 KT of combined memory. (108KT of unbroken trytes)
27 KT of memory per bank (18KT of unbroken trytes per bank)
6 memory banks
1-trit mono and 3-trit RGB framebuffer graphics at 114x81 and 54x38
2 text modes
1-trit digital samples at 2 and 4 KHZ
3 voice square wave sound chip
hardware-thread-based multitasking
various conversion tools relating to the internal data formats.

In conclusion: 
I hope you enjoyed that short look back on SBTCVM's first generation codebase, as the SBTCVM project moves on to bigger and better things.