Now that I got some instruction set design done, I believe it is time to use the initial 4 bit ALU design and build up an initial full sized 16 bit ALU design. That means dealing with all the flags that can be set by the ALU, as well as dealing with the additional instructions that cannot be implemented in the hardware of the initial 4 bit sliced ALU.
In my last post, I've taken a few initial thoughts regarding opcodes. Added to that come first inklings to wanting to try my hand at writing an assembler in Python. But, to do that, I think I need to add at least one new command to load constant values from memory into memory, without having to resort to playing around with specific addresses.
I think I need to write down a bit about the way I want to see interrupts to work out for the DWMC-16. Partially to be able to remember it for later, partially to answer a question I got after the last post.
And, once again, I will have to thank someone on the internet for giving me some constructive criticism, which made me do a little light reading and some thinking.
With some of the basics out of the way, I think I can now deal with an initial instruction set for the computer. I plan to do a somewhat minimal instruction set, but I do not think I will be able to keep it at less than 32 instructions as 'Minimal Instruction Set Computing' requires.