About This Site
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.
Tiny CPU - Another custom-designed minimal CPU, implemented in a small CPLD.
Backcountry Logger – A portable device for measuring and graphing altitude, temperature, and air pressure data.
3D Graphics Thingy – An attempted custom 3D graphics coprocessor in an FPGA.
Big Mess o’ Wires
Why not “Big Mess of Wires”? What happened to the letter F? Top o’ the morning. Luck o’ the Irish. Op-amps o’ plenty. It’s supposed to be funny. Haha…
T-Shirts
You can buy Big Mess o’ Wires T-Shirts from Cafe Press.
Contact Me
Please send me your thoughts and questions!
8 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 !
Impressive…
I’m motivated and thinking to do it by myself. But first I need to learn those logic gates stuff. Anyways… Thanks for sharing this with the world.
Steve, you’ve seen me say this before, but that’s how I got started. I practically wore out an unsuspecting Apple II doing all of those things with it.
Come to think of it, the same thing happened to a series of IBMPC compatible jobs before I ended up at this end.
I’m still interested in how the machines think (or seem to be thinking).
Nice wire wrapping job ! who knows now what is wrapping ?
Steve, can only hook on to the comments before.
GREAT jobs done here !
Thank you for sharing and spending your time.