Exploring the Science Fair Microcomputer Trainer

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2024-02-27 17:30:10

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This project was created on 02/19/2024 and last updated 4 days ago.

In the first video, we are taking a first look and measure the performance of the system in terms of executed instructions per second - how does it compare to the Microtronic, Kosmos CP1, and the Philips Masterlab? How many MIPS (Million Instructions per Second) can it do? Or is it more in the HIPS (Hundred Instructions per Second) region? See for yourself:

In the second video, I give an in-depth overview of the system and we are writing a complex program to explore its emulated, virtual machine language. The program aims to give an impression of the machine's capabilities and covers a good amount of the instruction set, including hex display & LED output, keypad input, arithmetics, comparisons, conditional branching, and different addressing modes, including indexed memory access. The different registers and build-in "firmware sub-routines (CALs)" are explained as well. After watching this video, you'll have a pretty good overview and understanding of the machine's capabilities:

Here is my instruction set cheat sheet here - the Science Fair manual is quite instructive and contains great examples, explaining every op-code in good detail. However, it really lacks a number of overview tables. This table is meant to fill that gap: