I got a TOP 2007 universal programmer yesterday, for burning EPROMs, GALs, and Flash memory. Whenever I hear the term “universal programmer”, I imagine a nerd-equivalent of the 1992 movie Universal Soldier, starring Jean-Claude Van Damme. Plot: a mild-mannered C++…
I’ve started creating schematics for the machine, using an evaluation version of CSiEDA 5. Making a real schematic that shows all the parts, pins, and interconnections is amazingly time-consuming, but it’s essential if I want to avoid making construction mistakes.…
I’m trying to finish up the final hardware design now, so I can get started with actually building this thing. Although it will probably never be truly “done”, I don’t want to end up ripping out half the components and…
My long-awaited delivery of hardware arrived yesterday, including a protoboard, tools, and about half the components I need to build the machine. I’m using the protoboard to try various test circuits, before I construct the real thing on the wire…
I used Verilog to do a simple test to estimate the machine’s top clock speed. I kept increasing the clock rate until the validation test suite started failing, and it topped out at about 2.63MHz. That feels respectable for a…
Time to celebrate! I powered through the remainder of the microcode for the core machine instructions, along with a full test suite to verify each instruction, and it all works. That’s 50 different instructions, and a couple of hundred individual…
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