[tjpnz]

Another Kiwi here too. First I've ever heard of the "Waikato RISC Architecture" but am curious to learn more.

I'm not the author but my view of the NZ tech sector is that it's pretty much stagnant. I ended up taking my skills elsewhere as did most of the people I remain in contact with from my UC days. It seems successive governments have put all their eggs into the agricultural export market. That's a real shame.

[0x90nz]

If you want to learn more there's a website [1] for the WRAMP architecture which goes into a fair bit of detail. The manual specifically is what students are (or at least were when I was at Waikato) given as a resource to understand it.

The toolchain and simulator are also available on GitHub [2], though it looks like the author has their own fork from an older version. A few years ago the the project was ported from a custom board to an off-the-shelf FPGA dev board and the simulator was renamed from "rexsim"/"RexSimulator" to "wsim", hence the difference in name.

[1] https://wramp.wand.nz/

[2] https://github.com/wandwramp

[halfer53]

Wow, I didn't know WAND had a github page. I'll get my fork merged with the main repo in that case.

The custom fork basically adds a extra button "Quick Load", since the srec file can be quite large to transfer through serial port to load, so I just implemented extra button to read srec file directly into memory.

[fennecfoxy]

Also another kiwi: grew up in a coastal city in the North Island and moved to Auckland for uni, dropped out and started working in the industry (best decision) before eventually moving to London.

Been here 3.5 years now (although I still don't know if 2020 really counts) and the tech sector is great here. Maybe not as cutting edge/well funded/as high salaries as America, but I feel like the work/life balance is better in Europe.

NZ is great but I have a feeling I'll head back there once I'm a lot older; it's beautiful but there are very few opportunities when you're young.

[ZephyrBlu]

That's basically what I thought, but it sucks to hear that.

Whereabouts did you go from NZ? I'm working remotely right now and want to leave NZ after travel opens up. Compared to other places in the world NZ seems terrible for a young, single guy in tech.

[tjpnz]

I went to Tokyo. Not where people typically go but it's a fun place to live. Salaries are about on par with Australia and Western Europe provided you have some experience.