After digging out and engraving the ROM bank (about 70x30), i linked up a few hundred more plates and stuff. Mechanism count stands at just over 3100. And i still haven't touched the operation control, although the program counter is built and the circuit for acquiring and handing over the addition results _looks_ correct. I have a few more days until the next version comes out (or so it seems), but it might take me longer. We'll see.
Features
- 6 bit instructions (because of minecarts. Yes, that's the reason.)
- mix of mechanical and minecart logic (well, what else would i build?)
- kind-of-Harvard architecture: separate program and data registers, addition, incrementation and comparison can only be done on data, but reading and writing will (hopefully) also be possible from/into the program registers. There are a whopping three general-purpose data registers (10 bits wide, for no particular reason)
- instruction set: read, write, increment/decrement, add, compare (skip next instruction if true), jump if zero bit not set, load module, various. Some of these are supposed to do very different things depending on the three-bit argument (various, e.g. includes "Halt" and "print" and "toggle read/write access"). Since it's all very minecart-centric, i'll need to wire up just about every possible read command separately, so it won't make _that_ much of a difference.
I don't think i have anything that'd qualify as a data or adress or whatever bus - it's not a very useful concept when working with minecarts and one-tile switchable buildings like doors and hatches.