Valhalla Project Introduction
The Valhalla Project was founded to provide hardware, software, and
documentation for the purposes of both education and fun. I'm going to attempt to
design a new microprocessor and computer architecture and document the whole
project. Another thing I plan is a new operating system for the computer.
The first processor design, Valhalla processor #0 - from now on, V0 for short -
was inspired by Cray 1, RISC-V, as well as other existing computer platforms.
The V0 instruction set is relatively RISC-like in nature, but with certain extra
features for some areas of software development. The instruction set and
architecture aim to provide support for virtual memory as well as other common
aspects of multitasking multiprocessor environments with support for multiple
threads of execution, with an obvious example of certain atomic instructions for
uses such as reference counting and synchronization.
The V0 architecture is designed to be [relatively] simple and easy to understand
and I'm in the hopes the architecture and later on, the documentation, would be
useful for educational purposes. Therefore, I plan to write a book or several
ones to document the microprocessor design, the upcoming toolchain of an
assembler and a C compiler, as well as the operating system called Zen which I'm planning to implement for the project.
The initial plan is to implement, test, and debug V0 on readily available,
inexpensive FPGA development boards. My choice is the Arcade Megawing Papilio Bundle from Gadget Factory (with the Papilio Pro).
The following list describes some of my planned features for a retro-style
console which I'm aiming to implement with V0.
- emulation of the Commodore 64 SID sound chip
- hardware implementation of the SAM speech synthesizer
- 640x360 and/or 640x480 VGA graphics with 12-bit pixels
- support for PS/2 keyboards and mice
- support for digital joysticks a'la Atari 2600, Commodore 64 and such
- 2D graphics with sprites and simple shapes
- analog-modeling digital synthesizer
- first game of Mjolnir, a cyberpunk-themed Roguelike with hand-drawn
graphics
- detailed documentation of the machine architecture; both design and
implementation
documentation for the purposes of both education and fun. I'm going to attempt to
design a new microprocessor and computer architecture and document the whole
project. Another thing I plan is a new operating system for the computer.
The first processor design, Valhalla processor #0 - from now on, V0 for short -
was inspired by Cray 1, RISC-V, as well as other existing computer platforms.
The V0 instruction set is relatively RISC-like in nature, but with certain extra
features for some areas of software development. The instruction set and
architecture aim to provide support for virtual memory as well as other common
aspects of multitasking multiprocessor environments with support for multiple
threads of execution, with an obvious example of certain atomic instructions for
uses such as reference counting and synchronization.
The V0 architecture is designed to be [relatively] simple and easy to understand
and I'm in the hopes the architecture and later on, the documentation, would be
useful for educational purposes. Therefore, I plan to write a book or several
ones to document the microprocessor design, the upcoming toolchain of an
assembler and a C compiler, as well as the operating system called Zen which I'm planning to implement for the project.
The initial plan is to implement, test, and debug V0 on readily available,
inexpensive FPGA development boards. My choice is the Arcade Megawing Papilio Bundle from Gadget Factory (with the Papilio Pro).
The following list describes some of my planned features for a retro-style
console which I'm aiming to implement with V0.
- emulation of the Commodore 64 SID sound chip
- hardware implementation of the SAM speech synthesizer
- 640x360 and/or 640x480 VGA graphics with 12-bit pixels
- support for PS/2 keyboards and mice
- support for digital joysticks a'la Atari 2600, Commodore 64 and such
- 2D graphics with sprites and simple shapes
- analog-modeling digital synthesizer
- first game of Mjolnir, a cyberpunk-themed Roguelike with hand-drawn
graphics
- detailed documentation of the machine architecture; both design and
implementation
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