The Virtual Motherboard Homepage

The Virtual Motherboard is hosted under sourceforge (see: http://sourceforge.net/projects/vmb/). There you can get source code and browse the subversion repository.

Here you find documents, specifications for individual devices and links to ready to run binary examples.

Latest Version: 2.2.1

Win32 Setup file: setup_2_2_1.exe

Latest German Version: 2.2.1

The German version features a German help file for the MMIXIDE.

Win32 Setup file: setup_2_2_1_de.exe .

Device Documentation

mother - the motherboard herself
serial - a simple serial communication device
winvram - Framebuffer Device with Mouse and GPU
timer - Timer Device to generate interrupts and get the current time and date.
led - LEDs to turn on and off
button - push button sending interrupts to the system
sevensegment - a sevensegment display for numbers
sound - NEW: a sound card that plays PCM or MP3 data (Win32)
screen - serial output device to display characters
keyboard - serial input device to read characters from the keyboard or from a File
disk - hard disk controller to read and write blocks in a disk (image).
hostdisk - a pseudo hard disk to read and write files from the host system.
RAM - from 1 Byte to 4 GByte RAM
ROM - Read only memory defined by an image file
FLASH - Read/Write memory made persistent through an image file
mmix - the MMIX CPU
MMIXIDE - NEW: the MMIX Integrated Development Envoronment (Win32)

General Documentation

Installation

Windows
Currently, the simplest way to install the VMB devices is available for Windows users.
Download the setup_vmb_2_1.exe file, double click it, and you are done.
If all goes well, it will start a simple configuration: from the file readme.vmb: a screen, a keyboard, a MMIX CPU, a ROM, and a ROM image. The keyboard will initially take input from the file readme.txt. The CPU will take instructions from ROM, and these will take input from the keyboard and send it to the screen. So you should see the readme file.
To compile the executables yourself, you need to download the sources (see below) and use Visual Studio. The sources contain the necessary project and solution files.

Linux
Linux users have to compile the devices from sources obtained from svn (see: http://sourceforge.net/projects/vmb/). Unfortunately, the Linux version has fallen somewhat in disrepair. Currently I do most of the development under Windows and I do not have the time to keep up with the Linux version.

Known Bugs and Fixes

Currently, the support for OS X is not very good. But demand for this platform is increasing, and I hope to be able to take care of a basic working set of devices soon. For now, I post here an email to me summarizing the current state of affairs. Any improvements or suggestions are welcome.

Examples

To avoid duplication of efforts, examples have moved to the MMIX Homepage.