The original BMOW: a custom-designed, hand-built 8-bit CPU and computer.
Today I moved a few steps closer to completion of the initial hardware design. First, I verified that BMOW’s interrupt mechanism actually works. My previous experiments with the keyboard and USB employed busy loops to continuously poll for new values.…
I’ve begun looking more deeply into the “Small C” compiler that Bill mentioned. It looks very cool, yet also wildly inefficient, which is about what I expected. With some more effort, I think I could get a working C compiler…
After another round of bug fixing and the creation of a BMOW keyboard driver, the keyboard works! And it truly works this time: pressing the A key shows “a” on the LCD, and pressing SHIFT and the A key shows…
I’ve gotten a bit derailed from the task of writing the keyboard scan code handler, into the bigger issue of how device drivers like this should work in general in BMOW. That’s led me to an entirely different question of…
The keyboard hardware interface works! I’m now a happy key-tapping fool, because with its own keyboard and LCD display, BMOW can operate completely independently from any host PC. The 4×20 LCD is certainly a very cramped workspace, so a Hyperterminal…
I’m sort of at a crossroads now, with the basic hardware working, and I need to decide what to do next. There’s still some remaining hardware work, of course: the keyboard and real-time clock, but neither of those is essential.…
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