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The TMS34010

Texas Instruments came to Media Cybernetics as a then market leader with their latest bleeding edge graphics chip, the TMS34010. The 34010 was a true 32-bit processor with thirty-two 32-bit registers, bit addressability (and variable field width!), and a few graphics instructions. It sat in its own address space on an ISA card, where it communicated with the outside world through memory mapped registers. It was basically an embedded device that ran in true parallel with the host processor. Our development board had no BIOS, no OS, only the 34010 and its own address space. Only the open steppe. So management in its infinite wisdom agreed to port the HALO 2D graphics library in time for the upcoming trade show in San Jose, a ridiculously short 6 weeks away. I didn't step back fast enough when they asked for volunteers, so I "volunteered" for the work. Between myself and another guy on my HALO team we managed to port the entire HALO graphics kernel from 8086 assembler to 34010 assembler.(As a principal engineer and manager I rated a screaming 10 Mhz 286 with a full 640 KB, he had only a 6 Mhz 286 with 512 KB of memory.) I designed a way to download and bootstrap the HALO 34010 kernel onto the 34010 device, using only a simulator and a serial port built into the 34010 device. We had no hardware assistance for debugging. A truly Herculean achievement. You could do a warm reboot and the 34010 device would still be running, merrily drawing graphics from a vector list on its own display. Way cool. And this was way back in prehistory, in 1988. Truly revolutionary. Try doing that with a dual-core x64, dual-graphics card computer.

The TMS34010:Two Generations Too Soon?

Recently I received an out of the blue inquiry from a hobbyist requesting some information on the TMS34010. Interestingly a few days prior I had run across my design notes for the TMS34010 where I had detailed the port of the Media Cybernetics Halo graphics kernel onto the 34010 for an upcoming trade show. Talk about deja vu all over again.

The TMS34010 was a fully independent processor that ran in it's own address space, a relatively small memory window being mapped into the host adress space for data transfer and control. You could program the word size from 1 to 32 bits. You could also read or write the arbitrary word size from or to an arbitrary bit address. Totally awesome! Quite an advantage in the mid-80s when pixels were smaller than bytes, and had to be read and written using shifts and bitwise logical operations. Processor speed on a high end PC AT was 10 mHz, so this provided a significant speed advantage.

Even though the herculean effort to design and port the Halo graphics kernel was a success, the TMS34010 never seemed to find widespread success in the graphics card market. I heard rumors of it being used in the unglamorous niche markets of fax machines and printers, where it's bit twiddling prowess would have provided a significant benefit. So to me the TMS34010 drifted out of thought, to be relegated to that twilight of yet another technology that was just too far ahead of its time.

So imagine my surprise when I heard the hobbyist was tinkering with an arcade game complete with 34010 processor on board. (Below are a closeup of the 34010 on the board and the entire arcade game board.) I've been meaning for years to transfer the 34010 compiler and other tools from the aging 5-1/4" floppies (with the gargantuan capacity of 360 KB!) Hopefully they still are readable. (I was told that VHS tapes would lose the image in a few years but I still have movies taped from HBO in 1984 that are still alive and well, so I'm optimistic.) I hope to make this page a resource for others trying to breathe life into an old 34010 system or trying to port 34010 code onto a more modern platform. I still have the 34010 programmer's manual (a fascinating architecture, a 32-bit word with Motorola like instructions and a scan line by scan line programmable palette) but whereas I may try to set up an old machine to read the floppies I can't see myself scanning the manual. Any links to a digital version of the programmer's manual would be awesome.