tsvm

tsvm /tiː.ɛs.viː.ɛm/ is a fantasy computer platform: a virtual machine whose architecture is inspired by the 8-bit and early 16-bit home computers, built from the ground up around running JavaScript as its native machine code.

What started as "an 8-bit-flavoured VM that runs JS" has grown into a complete, self-hosted retro computing ecosystem — with its own BIOS, operating system, filesystem, video and audio codecs, video display coprocessor with its own assembly language, tracker music format, and a stack of userland tools that together come closer to a small alternate-history computer line than a single-binary emulator.

This repository contains the virtual machine core, the reference BIOS implementations, the TVDOS operating system, the Videotron2K video display controller, hardware-accelerated codec backends for the TEV / TAV / TAD media formats, and the multi-platform packaging scripts. The TerranBASIC repository provides the matching BASIC dialect that ships on the system disk.

What's actually in here

The virtual machine

• VM core (tsvm_core/) — memory model, peripheral bus, MMIO, JS sandboxing through GraalVM, watchdog, DMA engine, and cooperative scheduling. Up to 8 hot-pluggable peripheral slots, each with a dedicated MMIO window and memory-space window mapped into the VM's negative address range.
• Multiple BIOS implementations (assets/bios/) — including the reference tsvmbios.js, an OpenBIOS variant, the TBM-BIOS for TerranBASIC machines, and the Pip-Boy-style pipboot.rom. BIOSes are first-class swappable components, not a fixed boot blob.
• Reference monitor / debugger (mon.js) for poking at memory and peripherals from a running machine.
• Multi-platform packaging (buildapp/) — scripts to produce Linux x86_64 / ARM64 AppImages, macOS Intel / Apple Silicon bundles, and Windows builds, each with its own jlink-trimmed JDK 21 runtime.

Peripherals (the "hardware")

Living under tsvm_core/src/net/torvald/tsvm/peripheral/:

• Graphics adapters — the standard GraphicsAdapter, plus TexticsAdapter for text-mode framebuffers, ExtDisp for external displays, and a RemoteGraphicsAdapter for networked rendering.
• Audio devices — AudioAdapter (the main programmable sound chip with PCM channels, an Impulse Tracker-style resonant low-pass filter, and a hardware-accelerated TAD decoder), OpenALBufferedAudioDevice, and the MP2Env MPEG audio environment.
• Disk drives — TevdDiskDrive (TEVD custom filesystem), ClusteredDiskDrive, TestDiskDrive, and a latency-simulator script for testing slow-storage behaviour.
• Networking and serial — HttpModem, HSDPA / HostFileHSDPA for high-speed packet I/O, SerialStdioHost, BlockTransferInterface / BlockTransferPort.
• Terminals and displays — TTY, GlassTty, TermSim, and a CharacterLCDdisplay for HD44780-flavoured projects.
• Memory expansion — RamBank for bank-switched memory, plus a programmable TestFunctionGenerator.

Videotron2K — the video coprocessor

Videotron2K is a programmable video display controller with its own assembly-like language, six general registers (r1–r6), special registers (tmr, frm, px, py, c1–c6), a scene-based programming model, and conditional postfixes (zr, nz, gt, ls, ge, le). Programs declare SCENE blocks and dispatch them with perform. Drawing primitives include plot, fillin, fillscr, and goto. See Videotron2K.md and the VDC implementation under tsvm_core/.../vdc/.

TVDOS — the operating system

assets/disk0/tvdos/ is a complete DOS-style userland:

• Kernel and drivers — TVDOS.SYS, HSDPADRV.SYS, hyve.SYS, installable drivers under moviedev/ and tuidev/.
• Custom filesystem — TEVD, with the on-disk format documented in tvdos/filesystem.md.
• Internationalisation — Colemak / Dvorak / QWERTY keymaps and an i18n/ resource tree.
• Userland binaries (tvdos/bin/) — a shell (command.js), file tools (hexdump, less, tee, touch, printfile, writeto, defrag, lfs, drives), an editor (edit.js), a file manager (zfm.js), a network fetcher (geturl), gzip/Zstd helpers, palette tools, and a battery of media players (playmp2, playpcm, playwav, playmv1, playtev, playtav, playtad, playucf).
• Taut tracker — a full in-VM tracker (taut.js, taut_instredit.js, taut_sampleedit.js, taut_notationedit.js, taut_fileop.js) with its own font and chrome assets.

Codecs and media formats

tsvm ships a small but serious codec lab. Encoders are written in C and live in video_encoder/; decoders are split between JavaScript players in TVDOS and hardware-accelerated Kotlin backends in the VM core.

• iPF (Type 1 / 2 / 1-delta) — picture and legacy movie format. Encoders: encodeipf.js, encodemov.js, encodemov2.js. Documented in terranmon.txt.
• TEV (TSVM Enhanced Video) — modern DCT codec with motion compensation, 16×16 blocks, YCoCg-R 4:2:0, and either quality-mode or bitrate-mode rate control. Encoder: video_encoder/encoder_tev.c. Decoder: playtev.js, with tevDecode / tevIdct8x8 / tevMotionCopy8x8 accelerated in GraphicsJSR223Delegate.kt.
• TAV (TSVM Advanced Video) — successor to TEV based on the Discrete Wavelet Transform. Five wavelet types (5/3 reversible, 9/7 irreversible, CDF 13/7, DD-4, Haar), 6-level decomposition, EZBC sparsity coding, perceptual quantisation, and an optional 3D temporal DWT that encodes whole groups of pictures as one unified wavelet tree. Includes a packet inspector (tav_inspector.c) and coefficient visualiser (tav_visualise_coefficients.c).
• TAD (TSVM Advanced Audio) — perceptual audio codec at 32 kHz stereo, using CDF 9/7 wavelets, M/S decorrelation, gamma compression, pre-emphasis, EZBC, and Zstd. Achieves ~2.5:1 compression vs. PCMu8 at quality 3 while preserving the full 0–16 kHz band. Designed to be embeddable inside TAV so audio chunks can align with video GOP boundaries.
• Taud — tracker module format with conversion tools from the major formats: it2taud.py (Impulse Tracker), mod2taud.py (ProTracker / FastTracker), s3m2taud.py (Scream Tracker 3), plus 2taud.sh and shared helpers in taud_common.py. Note effects are documented in TAUD_NOTE_EFFECTS.md. The AudioAdapter runs the same IIR-only 2-pole resonant low-pass topology used by Impulse Tracker / OpenMPT / Schism.
• MP2 — reference MPEG-1 Layer II environment via MP2Env.kt and playmp2.js.

Languages and runtimes

• JavaScript is the VM's native code, executed by GraalVM in a sandboxed context with a curated set of host bindings (graphics, audio, filesystem, DMA, compression, networking, low-level peek/poke).
• TerranBASIC is provided by the TerranBASIC repository and shipped as tbas on the system disk. The TerranBASICexecutable/ subproject packages a BASIC-only flavour of the machine.
• Videotron2K assembly for VDC programs.

Documentation

• terranmon.txt — the architecture reference (memory map, peripheral protocol, codec bitstreams).
• doc/*.tex — machine-readable LaTeX sources for the TSVM and TVDOS manuals, built with doc/makepdf.sh.
• Videotron2K.md — VDC programming guide.
• TAUD_NOTE_EFFECTS.md — tracker effect reference.
• CLAUDE.md — a condensed map of the project for collaborators (and language-model assistants) working in the tree.

Building and running

Prerequisites

JDK 21 runtimes laid out under ~/Documents/openjdk/ with platform-specific names:

• jdk-21.0.1-x86 — Linux AMD64
• jdk-21.0.1-arm — Linux Aarch64
• jdk-21.0.1-windows — Windows AMD64
• jdk-21.0.1.jdk-x86 — macOS Intel
• jdk-21.0.1.jdk-arm — macOS Apple Silicon

jlink is then used to produce trimmed runtimes under out/runtime-*.

Common entry points

• Run the emulator — TsvmEmulator.java (in tsvm_executable/).
• Run TerranBASIC-only build — TerranBASIC.java (in TerranBASICexecutable/).
• Package an installable bundle — pick the right script in buildapp/:
  • build_app_linux_x86.sh
  • build_app_linux_arm.sh
  • build_app_mac_x86.sh
  • build_app_mac_arm.sh
  • build_app_windows_x86.sh
• Build C encoders — in video_encoder/: make (TEV), make tav, make tad.

Encoding sample media

# Quality-mode TEV encode
./encoder_tev -i input.mp4 -o clip.tev -q 3

# TAV with 9/7 wavelet, quality 4
./encoder_tav -i input.mp4 -w 1 -q 4 -o clip.tav

# TAV with 3D temporal DWT (GOP-unified encoding)
./encoder_tav -i input.mp4 --temporal-dwt -o clip.tav

# TAD audio at the highest quality
./encoder_tad -i input.mp4 -o track.tad -q 5

Then, inside TVDOS:

A:\> playtev clip.tev
A:\> playtav clip.tav
A:\> playtad track.tad

Repository layout

tsvm_core/             VM core, peripherals, VDC, JS bindings (Kotlin)
tsvm_executable/       Main emulator GUI (LibGDX)
TerranBASICexecutable/ For creatingTerranBASIC executable
assets/bios/           BIOS ROMs and source
assets/disk0/          Boot disk image, including all of TVDOS
video_encoder/         C encoders, decoder libs, inspectors (TEV / TAV / TAD)
ipf_encoder/           Reference iPF encoder
doc/                   LaTeX sources for the TSVM / TVDOS manuals
buildapp/              Per-platform packaging scripts
My_BASIC_Programs/     Example BASIC programs
*.py, *.sh, *.kts      Conversion tools and ad-hoc utilities

Licence

See COPYING.