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Tunguska

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About

Tunguska is a ternary computer emulator. On a good day, it's
performance it is roughly equivalent with that of a personal computer
from the 1980's, with peak speeds around 1,000,000 operations per
second, on a more normal day roughly 250,000 ops/sec.

It is loosely based on the excellent design of the (binary)
6502-processor by MOS Technology, but entirely ternary. So instead of
having two memory cell states (0, 1), it has three (-1, 0, 1).

The machine uses tryte-width (tryte = ternary analog to "byte") 6,
with 3^6=729 states per tryte.

The name is both a tip of the hat to the predominantly russian
heritage of ternary computing, and an (obsolete) in-joke about the
stability of an earlier version.

Components

Besides the emulator itself, tunguska has several other components:

Assembler
    The tunguska assembler compiles assembly code into a compressed
    binary format that the emulator can run.
Operating system
    Tunguska comes with a crude operating system, written in
    assembly, it has functions for basic I/O and provides a less
    programmer-hostile environment than a blank memory slate.
C compiler
    In development is also a C-like language that will translate into
    assembly code. At this stage, it is rudimentally functioning, but
    very early alpha. Since the main goal is to provide a higher
    level alternative to assembly, it will not initially have all the
    functionality standard C has.

Purpose

"I wonder how it would be if my computer was ternary?", I asked
myself a while back. I googled around, and found a few stub-ish
wikipedia articles, a few pages explaining why ternary computing is
vastly superior to everything, and some documents discussing russian
experiments in the 1950's.

Obviously, this wouldn't do. I wanted a hands-on computer I could
play with. So I got to work, and a few months later, this is the
result.

So, the purpose is to provide a simple and accessible, yet powerful
playground for ternary computing for the man in the street (with a
decent understanding of assembly programming and general computer
infrastructure).

Goals

The goal of the project is primarily enjoyment, but undirected
programming won't really produce anything useful, so some sort of
priorities and goals need to be defined. In descending order of
importance:

 1. Simplicity / usability
 2. Speed
 3. Beautiful code
 4. Experimentation

The goal of the project is ultimately to make ternary computing
widely accessible to those who are interested. As a diversion, as a
toy, as a what-if; to tug a bit in the binary groupthink, and see if
something comes loose.

An important side-goal is to document the project well enough so that
people who don't quite meet the knowledge level required to
understand Tunguska easily can catch up on the essentials.

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(c)opy(direction) 2008 Viktor Lofgren <vlofgren(Q)gmail.com>
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