About BMOW
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.
4 Comments so far
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[…] (this is the part were more than half of you think I’m crazy, nerdy, or both) In a nutshell, it’s a home made CPU. Personally I think it’s fricking awesome. […]
I am amazed at what you have been able to accomplish with just a few wires and posts (and other assorted bits). This kind of thing just blows me away because I know the difficulty and frustration projects like this can bring. Bravo!!
P.S. My cat would have a field day with that thing, but I wouldn’t let any cats near it….lol!
[…] because you can: living frugally, JavaScript pixel art and hand-built microprocessors. Also, C as a functional language is nicer to think about than I’d first thought. If you ever […]
Beautiful work.
I really admire what you have done. I am surprised you didnt have connection(continuity) problems.
Thank you for sharing this with the world !