Trouble with the GUI of the hardware simulator

[Dianelos]

I am having trouble using the GUI of the hardware simulator. Below a screenshot of my entire screen with the GUI maximized. As you can observe the lower part of the window is not displayed, nor can I scroll to the right in the HDL subwindow, nor can I resize the various subwindows. Also when I run a test script the echo does not work.

Nevertheless I managed to work through the projects up to the memory.hdl task. Here when I run the test script I cannot get the keyboard chip to produce the "K" ascii character when I press that key.

I am running your software on a Asus laptop, with a full HD display (1920x1080 pixels), under Windows 10 Home (version 10.0.17134 Build 17134). In order to use the book's software I downloaded the Java 8 (Update 211 build 1.8.0_211-b12) run-time system from the recommended site. I execute the hardware simulator by executing the provided .bat file.

[ivant]

This software was written a few years ago and not in the best way. Everything inside the main windows is placed on specific coordinates and resizing the main window has no effect outside of showing or hiding specific parts.

I suspect that the problem is caused by Windows trying to scale things up based on some HiDPI ratio or based on the default font scale. I don't know if you can configure this on a per-app basis or if it's for the whole desktop. In any case, you can start by googling for this kind of settings looking at the relevant windows configurations.

Please share your results here, so others who have the same problem can find the fix.

[Dianelos]

Thanks. Now the problem that has stopped me from advancing is that I cannot get the keyboard chip to produce the "K" ascii character when I press that key while running the memory.tst script. I don't think it's a bug in my HDL code, since I have downloaded a memory.hdl from github.com and it produces exactly the same problem.  

Anyway, instead of battling with the Java-Windows interaction I have have decided to write my own hardware simulator. I am using Lazarus Pascal. I have the parser of the book's HDL language already up and running. It works quite nicely for it points out one's syntactic errors. When I find the time I will write the simulator proper so that I can check the semantics of my chip designs, first by hand and then through scripts.

When I feel I have something useful - namely the computer chip correctly running the book's examples of object code - I will post my solution here in case others feel like using it.