This release contains Windows and Silicon (ARM64) Mac binaries of Issie for production use Autumn and Spring terms 24-25. it will have bug fix updates only. Issie will also run on intel macs and unix systems, but you will need to create your own binaries for that: we do not support it.
How to install and run the binaries on your machine
The main changes from last year are fixing some quite bad but never reported memory leaks, and large improvements to the waveforms simulator. This has been a challenging part of Issie to get right but it is now very usable, even on long simulations. In addition the code has had major refactoring to make future development & maintenance.
- Credit for the initial waveform simulator scrollbar and on-demand waveform generation goes to Samuel Wang.
- Credit for the memory leak fixes goes to Tom Clarke
- Credit for bringing the memory leak to the attention of the developers goes to Radaan Madhan
- Please could any bugs found in this v5.2.x release be reported ASAP! They can be fixed.
Fixed from last year
- Fix: a bad memory leak #463 that caused slowdown and crashes when working on medium-sized or bigger designs
- Fix: a different memory leak that caused crashes when repeating very long waveform simulations of large designs
- Fix: many minor issues
- Fix (internal) waveform simulator has been refactored as 8 separate source files and is now easy to work on.
New Features
- Waveform Simulation improvements
- Feat: a (very nice) responsive software horizontal scrollbar. Waveforms are now generated on demand only for the visible clock cycles.
- Feat: waveform numeric values positioned better for legibility
- Feat: waveforms grey out nicely when numeric values are too long to print.
- Feat: numeric values have been shortened: the 0 in front of radixed numbers is omitted, and the radix itself is omitted when the numbers are single digit.
- Feat: waveforms scroll vertically if necessary separately from simulator top controls and the RAM viewer.
- Feat: usable simulating up to 1,000,000 clock cycles
- Feat: a new RAM viewer windowed mode for viewing RAMs that have a large number of non-zero memory locations
- Feat: a super-zoom feature for viewing long waveforms
- Feat: configuration popup for changing font sizes and other parameters
- Feat: rationalised top controls with new help buttons
- Feat: arrow keys control highlighted cycle
- Feat: arbitrary length busses - previous limitations on constants, bus compare, memory have been removed so all of Issie will work with up to 16384 bit busses.
- Feat: very long bus-width number printing has been improved
- Feat: new Eratosthenes Sieve demo shows waveforms over 800,000 cycles and all of RAM written.