Wow, blast from the past! I was on the architecture / micro-architecture team for the 29K and 29050, and your story of writing and debugging the emulator brought up similar memories of working on the performance simulator for these chips.

Very impressive work -- congratulations!

Somewhere in my collection I have an AMD 29K-based tablet that was used in São Paulo's stock exchange trading floor. It had a huge IR LED array that, I assume, was used to transmit orders to receivers installed near the monitors. I managed to boot it from ROM, but it seemed the machine was waiting for the transmitter to send it its boot image.

Would have been an interesting project. Considering the size of the array, I'd be able to control all TVs from the building one block down.

Writing a windowing OS straight in machine code for the Am29000 is wild. The emulator debugging story is the part I would love expanded.

> The AMD Am29000 processor came out in 1987, also announced as the world's fastest processor (do you see a meme here?) and it could process one instruction every cycle, so indeed it was fast.

The AMD 29k - the fastest CPU you never heard of? No, seriously, I am quite interested in computer hardware, and Computer Architecture by Patterson/Hennessy was required reading during my studies, but I can't say I ever heard of this CPU architecture, which is "based on the seminal Berkeley RISC" (according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Am29000). And it seems to have been quite widely used, but not in an actual computer (except for this one)...

Thanks Oscar - as always, a very very nice writing style - a good read!

F 15 Strike Eagle, Infiltrator and 688 Attack Sub were some of my first games.

And then came Leisure Suit Larry and the tweenage years.

The breadboard computer from 1997 deserves it's own post.

Very interesting article, I wasn't aware of the Am29000.

You sir, are a rockstar!

OP just casually dropped awesomeness on a Thursday.