idea for a friendly project

Hi. I am a newbie programmer who is frustrated with a lot of

computing things. Some of those things are, proprietry names on

functions, libraries written by others, and in general a difficult time

in remembering all of those names! I have nothing against all of

the afore mentioned, but I do have a pet dream project...


I wish to build a simple software computer. I have a couple of

pre reqs with it, in that I want it to be modelled on real things

and I want it to be independant of the host. The former is easy to

explain. I want to model the comonents of an electronic ciruit in

C++ first and then use them to build models of ics.

The later is more amiquous. I want the program to run in it's own

world as much as it can. If worse comes to worse, I would have it

making calls to either the GDI or ASM routines. But 'my' ultimate

dream is to have a numerical output that can be processed

externally after the running of a program to find what it

represents. Being a puriest, I will have to write the os and all the

simple little programs for the comp in it's own asm.

If anyone feels they would like to contribute to this in any way,

please feel free to mai me, or post, but I have a good plan already

formulated. I would really like people to help me with modelling

certain hardware and auxillaries as this system will need the lot.

The main goal is to build something with software that can be

built in real life.


Thanks!

Uh... you want to write an emulator for a computer that doesn't exist?

Not really. If it doesn't work, does it matter? I want to build a cpu

that can at least perform adding, subtracting and shifting. But I

am not trying for something that will be useful. I am trying for a

better understanding of existing systems.

Sorry, can't help you with that. CPU design is not my area.

Maybe you should find some people who have studied electronics?

Oh, I don't need help with the cpu design. That's the part I want

to do. I would like interested people to choose a piece of

hardware and try to model it. 'Try' is the word here! It's just for

fun, and to gain a deeper learning of the realm of computers.

This will not likely work, since many kinds of projects like this have tried and failed, working together should be face to face not on the internet. Not to mention different coding styles. There are too many technicalities.

OpenSource projects work quite well without any face-to-face working. That's not the issue I think.

The issue IMHO is that not many people would like to spend/waste a lot of time (this is complicated!) on such an utterly useless thing.

Maybe it was this thread that Bubba was talking about?

http://cboard.cprogramming.com/showt...threadid=42129

Quite possible.

Sorry about the double spaced posts!