My recent wire-wrapping progress has been painfully slow: I’ve timed myself at about 2 minutes per wire. You might wonder how it could possibly take that long, but all the measuring, stripping, threading, wrapping, and squinting time really adds up.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
The first draft of the BMOW schematics are finished, along with complete equation lists for the 11 unique GALs (18 GALs total). This is everything needed to actually build the machine. You can view it all on the technical info…
The first draft of the schematics are complete. It was a good exercise, as working out every connection for every chip forced me to consider a few points I’d glossed over before. I ended up having to introduce a few…
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