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 CVS repository.

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

Latest Version: 1.5

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
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).
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

General Documentation

Installation

Windows
Currently, the simplest way to install the VMB devices is available for Windows users.
Download the setup 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.

You can also load the executables individually from this directory.
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. Either obtained from cvs (see: http://sourceforge.net/projects/vmb/) or as a tgz file. The sources come with Makefiles. If you have make and gcc, just execute make in the top source directory.

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 and binaries have moved to the MMIX Homepage.