Month February 2008

keyboard connector

Peripherals Galore

There’s been lots of recent activity on different fronts. Too bad I still haven’t made any progress actually building the machine. Keyboardin’ Part 2 Here’s a shot of my glorious hand-wired PS/2 keyboard connector. I spent some time over the…

Keyboarding

Last night I rigged up a system to read keypress data from a standard PS/2 style PC keyboard. I bought the necessary parts weeks ago, but I assumed it would be complicated to get working, and never made any progress…

Slow Progress

Last week I completed the board layout for BMOW, determining the placement for all the chips and other components. I even went as far as soldering in all the bypass capacitors, and wiring power and ground to the crystal oscillator…

Hello World LCD

Hello World, Take 2

In my continuing quest to procrastinate actual construction of the machine, I took some time this week to tinker around with my LCD module. It has a somewhat complicated command interface for configuring the display properties and uploading data, and…

simulator screenshot

BMOW Simulator

I spent a few days last week, and wrote a functional simulator for BMOW. This replaces the hardware-level Verilog simulation with a custom program written to match the behavior of the BMOW microcode interpreter. The simulator loads the microcode ROM…