This project has no active crowdfunding, donation, or fundraising campaigns of any kind.
If you have encountered any solicitation for donations related to GargantuRAM or the 5500FP processor — including on VK, Telegram, or any other platform — it is not authorized by the author and has no affiliation with this project.
The sole author and maintainer of the Ternary Computer System initiative is Claudio La Rosa, based in Italy.
Official channels: ternary-computing.com | Zenodo paper
GRam_OS is a minimal operating system for the 5500FP, a 24-trit balanced ternary RISC processor implemented on FPGA, and its open hardware development board GargantuRAM. It is written entirely in 5500FP Assembly and runs on real hardware.
This repository serves as a foundation for anyone who wants to develop software for the 5500FP architecture, and as a concrete proof that the system works correctly end-to-end — not just in its ternary computational core, but in all its foundational subsystems.
The 5500FP is a 24-trit balanced ternary RISC processor featuring a 120-instruction ISA, up to 81 general-purpose registers, native atomic instructions (CAS, FAA), and dual user/kernel stack pointers. It is implemented on an Efinix Trion T20F256 FPGA running at 20 MHz and presents a fully balanced ternary external interface (±3.3 V physical signals).
The GargantuRAM development board provides: 16M Word (64 MTryte) of static RAM, SD card slot, SPI ROM, and two USB serial interfaces.
More information on the architecture: ternary-computing.com
GRam_OS initializes the hardware and presents an interactive shell with the following built-in commands: cls (clears the screen), version (displays the OS version), ls (lists the contents of the SD Card via a simple dedicated filesystem), run (launches a program stored on the SD Card).
This repository is intended for anyone who wants to:
- have a working starting point for developing an OS or software on the 5500FP
- study how a balanced ternary CPU is programmed through real, running code
- contribute improvements: new shell commands, a richer filesystem, interrupt handling, and more
This branch is released under the Apache 2.0 permissive license and will not be further developed by the author. Anyone is free to fork it and take it in whatever direction they prefer, including commercial and closed-source projects.
Distributed under the Apache 2.0 permissive license. See LICENSE and NOTICE for details.
Copyright (c) 2024-2026 Claudio La Rosa