New contributor — documentation, web, and a ternary OOP prototype

[SkepticusMaximus]

Subject: New contributor — documentation, web, and a ternary OOP prototype

Hi Thomas and team,
I'm Stevo, a designer and prototype developer from Adelaide, Australia. I got SBTCVM running on my Linux Mint box yesterday and spent the morning playing the maze in curses and poking around the DOS shell. Haven't had that buzz since my first CLI machines decades ago. Brilliant project.

I'd like to get involved. My background is design, documentation, and system architecture. I use AI-assisted development — Claude for implementation support and as a tutor while I learn SBTCVM's assembly language and ISA from the ground up. I'm not just generating code blindly, I'm using AI to accelerate genuine learning of the machine.

Immediate contributions:
The web presence and documentation look like they could use some love. Good docs are a force multiplier for a project like this, especially one that deserves wider attention. I'd like to start there — improving help files, making the onboarding smoother for newcomers, and giving the web side some attention if that's welcome.

Longer term — TernOO:
I have a concept I'm calling TernOO — hardware-native object-oriented primitives for balanced ternary. The idea: use the first trit of a 9-trit tryte as a type tag. Zero = data, positive = reference, negative = executable. The machine intrinsically knows what kind of thing each tryte contains, enabling object dispatch through a single three-way CMP rather than software-level type tables and vtable lookups.

I'll be forking the repo to sandbox this — learning the codebase, experimenting with modifications, and testing the concept in my own space. If it proves out, I'd much rather bring it back to the main project than develop in isolation.

Wanted to introduce myself and my intentions rather than just fork silently. Would love to hear your thoughts if you're active, and happy to pitch in wherever help is needed regardless.

Cheers,
Stevo
Adelaide, South Australia

[ThomasTheSpaceFox]

Hey Stevo. As far as documentation, there's a LOT of technical notes not yet in the markdown docs. I never got around to reworking SSTNPL's documentation into markdown format either.

As for Learning SSTNPL and SBTCVM Assembly, the included source files for the various roms is a good place to start, outside of the documentation.

pygame

You should also try the pygame frontend if you havent already, as it features color text support (with 3-trit RGB foreground and background colors), along with a 'hardware plotter' graphics mode (SBTGA) that can draw lines, rectangles, and triangles on a grid, with 9-trit RGB (19,683 colors) and having pygame installed should enable the sound emulation on all frontends. It's also worth noting the graphics conversion tool uses Pygame to process images.

XAS

XAS may seem a bit odd, but it was designed to provide a minimal cross-platform build scripting system initially, before being expanded with an interactive mode.

XAS eventually proved invaluable for compiling larger projects like SBTCVM-DOS and SBTCVM Bench.

Some background

SBTCVM is certainly a unique project in the modern era. I had to develop everything from the ground up to support the VM itself, from the libbaltcalc ternary math library, to even the SBTCVM-BTT-2 text encoding.

I originally wrote SBTCVM's initial prototype, TDA Mark 1, after reading the balanced ternary wikipedia article, and messing around with ternary colorspaces.

'Gen 2' referrs to the fact that Gen2-9 is a redesign of the machine architecture and support code to fix many of the prototype codebase's flaws.

My goal with SBTCVM is to allow others to tinker with a Balanced Ternary computing environment with a virtual machine, and a suite of support tools such as SSTNPL, SBTCVM Assembly, XAS, and the supporting utilities like romdump.

finally

I'm happy to see someone diving headfirst into the code and ecosystem i so laboriously

Most of the development talk happens on the Discord, (which you can find an invite link to on that blogspot website).

• Cheers,
  Thomas.

[SkepticusMaximus]

Thanks Thomas, really appreciate the warm welcome and the pointers. I'll get onto the Discord shortly. The documentation work is right up my alley — I'll start there. I'm also tinkering with a concept for native object-oriented primitives using the type trit of the 9-trit tryte, but I want to understand the machine properly before I pitch anything. Your architecture is beautifully suited to it. More soon. Cheers, Stevo.