Re: Chess

Posted by WBahn on
URL: http://nand2tetris-questions-and-answers-forum.52.s1.nabble.com/Chess-tp4035234p4035237.html

Impressive. You have WAY too much free time on your hands!

It really sounds like you put a lot of quality work and effort into this.

How big is your ROM code?

It really is amazing how much you can do with a resource-starved platform.

Like go to the moon.

The Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) was a 16-bit machine with 2048 words of RAM and 36 kwords of ROM and ran at about 2 MHz. There were two basic versions, the Block I (flew on uncrewed missions) and the Block II (crewed missions). The Block I was made with 4100 IC packages each with a single 3-input NOR gate while the Block II used about 2800 ICs with dual 3-input NOR gates. The early Block I units had 1024 words of RAM and 12 kwords of ROM. The Block II units had 2048 kwords of RAM and 36 kwords of ROM.
 
While the Hack supports 28 instructions, the Block I AGC supported 11 and the Block II supported 34. So the Hack is very comparable in basic specs.

The AGC had more registers and it had a complex instruction set, so further comparison are much more difficult. But given the much higher clock speeds that we could drive a Hack at, I suspect that the overall computational power was roughly on par.