Micro-KIM weekend

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A rainy weekend was a perfect excuse to play with my micro-KIM, which had been collecting dust in a drawer for too long. I had fun using my own cross-assembler to develop and generate programs in paper tape format, and upload these to the micro-KIM via the PuTTY client.

I figured out how to use the 6532 RIOT to set up a timer-based interrupt service, which is an important step in separating actual computation from display and keypad handling. The following clip shows the difference between incrementing a three-byte memory counter at roughly 1000 times per second (timer delayed) and 100,000 times per second (full speed with about 10 cycles per iteration at 1MHz). Perhaps a nice illustration of how fast even those early computers were.


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