Saturday, May 19, 2018

SBTCVM Gen 2: on the road to alpha.

End of an era:
SBTCVM Mark 2 has been been in development for a while, and while Mark 2 has served the project well, and has taught the dev team some important things, its come to the point where Mark 2 has become too complex under the hood to make the jump to python 3 reasonably, and continue development in a orderly fashion.

Its with this, that I announce the official end-of-development for SBTCVM Mark 2, and its underlying "gen 1" codebase. Its replacement is currently being developed.

The future:
SBTCVM Generation 2 is slated to drasticly change not only how the VM works under the hood, and how its CPU works, but also how its used. With advanced features like SBTVDI, a virtual disk system and psudo-filesystem implementation that will work in tandem with a new subproject: SBTCVM DOS.

Some other features being explored are more advanced sound (like the digital sample system that was added to Mark 2 at the last minute), more interactive vm programs, and less cluttered, streamlined user interfaces. Thanks to the new modular codebase, plans exist for terminal-only, pygame, and a TK version when time allows. with the terminal version slated to be a subset of the more fleshed out TK and pygame versions.

Gen 2 is currently VERY early in development, so again, its hard to say what the exact details will be, or when it will be announced. That said, a "gen 2" status page can now be found on the blog (see the link bar above), and blog updates will be posted on major developments.

No comments:

Post a Comment