Big Mess o’ Wires

Back in early 1980’s, I lived and breathed the world of the Apple II, Atari 800, Commodore 64, and their brethren. I could PEEK and POKE those machines like nobody’s business, and I spent countless hours writing programs, playing games, or just fiddling around. In contrast to today’s PCs, the computers of that era were inviting to tinkerers, with a comparatively simple hardware design and a BASIC prompt at boot-up.

As a computer engineering major in college, I learned the details of digital logic design. I even built a rudimentary computer on a prototyping kit built into a suitcase: MIT’s infamous “Nerd Kit”. But at the end of the semester, it was all torn down, I went on to a career in software, and that was that.

More recently, I learned of various projects to build simple computers similar to those 80’s machines, constructed entirely of discrete logic chips like counters, adders, flip-flops, and NOR gates. No Pentiums or PowerPCs here– these people built their own CPUs from the ground up, along with the memory subsystem, I/O, and everything else the computer required. I had stumbled onto the world of the homebrew CPU. To create such a computer required a detailed microarchitectural design, custom instruction set design, custom software tools like assemblers and compilers, and of course a custom circuit board or three populated with lots of fat DIP chips and a big mess o’ wires. Projects like the Magic-1, D16/M, and Mark 1 FORTH Computer showed me the way.

I decided to build a homebrew CPU computer of my own. It was a big mess o’ wires.

Projects

BMOW 1 - A custom-designed, hand-built 8-bit CPU and computer.

3D Graphics Thingy - A custom 3D graphics coprocessor, still in the planning stage.