Category BMOW 1

The original BMOW: a custom-designed, hand-built 8-bit CPU and computer.

wire side of board

Construction

After ages of procrastination, I’m finally making some slow but measurable progress towards turning my paper design into reality, and actually building this crazy machine. Wire wrapping seems impossibly slow and tedious compared with working on a protoboard. Just creating…

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…

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