lol, not a robot, I've just worked in programming, hardware and embedded systems since high school.
When I get this infrastructure up and running maybe you and I can figure out a UI that's more of a teaching tool for newbies. (ha ha, I'm still a newbie) Maybe drop the local app and host the application as website and push programming to the VP using WebUSB. That way there is only 1 app to worry about. Just a thought! I have access to a 3gb up/3gb down fiber and host my own servers for no cost.
I've attached an example of the command line querying just one opcode.
Here is the opcodes.json file for you. If you have time, since you are more familiar with the instruction set can you validate the opcodes, parameters, examples, etc?
I'll keep working on the tools that use this data. If not I'll get to it eventually.
I made vp-asm and vp-man update their local opcodes.json data file automatically on startup. It queries an api on my server that I created tonight with the hash of local user's opcode file and if it's different than the hash of the file on the server it downloads and replaces it. When we update the opcodes.json file on the server it generates a new metafile with the information needed to query from the client. If the user doesn't have internet it just uses the file they already have.
vp-asm, vp-loader, vp-man are functional now, as well as the api endpoint. They will probably have issues, and missing details, but that's what qa is for when I'm finished. My next step is vp-chip which will work like apt or brew to query a manifest through the api and search for, pull down, install and upgrade chip files.
That's it for now.
It's getting close. I still have a lot of optimization and refactoring to do since I've been cheating by borrowing code from other projects so no everything is uniform.
Here is an example of where I'm at so far with vp-chip. It downloads a manifest with all the metadata of the available online chip files.
$ ./vp-chip.py refresh Manifest refreshed: 33 chips cached at chips/manifest.json $ ./vp-chip.py search 74LS00 74LS00 2606 bytes Quad 2-input NAND gate $ ./vp-chip.py show 74LS00 Name: 74LS00 Filename: 74LS00.chip Size: 2606 bytes SHA256: 4627b2916b7623d7d4197d7c200ec7d8867b52cf460a30e0d71c1ce423fd4b76 Updated: 2026-03-03T10:47:09+00:00 Summary: Quad 2-input NAND gate Aliases: 7400, SN74LS00 Tags: ttl, logic, nand, 7400-series Revision: 1 $ ./vp-chip.py install 74LS00 Installing 74LS00... Installed 74LS00 -> chips/chips/74LS00.chip $ ./vp-chip.py update 74LS00: up to date All installed chips are up to date.