Simulator Question, and Feedback

[GregTomkins]

Question: when making a Bit, how do you connect the out pin of the DFF to both the in pin of the Mux and the out pin of the Bit? It seems like you should be able to connect the DFF to Bit's out, and also to the Mux in, but the simulator doesn't allow that. I put a superfluous 'And' in the middle, and this works, but I am guessing there is a better way?

I love this book, it's amazingly interesting and well done. In the spirit of making it even better, I offer some feedback about the 'hardware simulator':

Issue #1: on some PC's I noticed the status bar doesn't show up unless you explicitly drag the window bigger. It is not obvious why your file is failing to load.

Issue #2: if you open a .hdl file from directory A, then open its corresponding .tst file from directory B, the .hdl file is also reloaded from directory B. It is not obvious why all the .tst's fail until you notice that the .hdl code isn't what you thought you had loaded.

Issue #3: the entire HW simulator fails to resize properly, which is not really a problem really, but looks a bit amateurish (especially when the rest of it is so nicely done).

Issue #4: the columns in the 'Internal Pins' window don't resize at all, and sometimes this makes their values unreadable. This makes debugging a bit more difficult than it needs to be.

Thanks for the book and site, Cheers !!!

[Shimon]

In our HDL, output pins have unlimited fan-out.  In other words, you can send multiple "copies" of the same value to several destinations. Thus, for example, you can write something like this: fooChip(...,out=x,out=y). This routes the out value simultaneously to both x and y. -- Shimon

P.S. Thx much for the tips that you suggested.

[milythael]

In regards to Issue #2, part of the .tst script is loading the chip it tests.  You don't load a chip, then load a test script to run against it.