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…
The schematics are nearly done. I’ve finished all of them except the memory/device subsystem, which is proving to be difficult. Unlike the registers and all the other machine components, the RAM and the USB interface don’t use a clock. Instead,…
My Hewlett-Packard 1631D logic analyzer / digital oscilloscope arrived today: the finest 1985 technology that $35 can buy. I bought it dirt cheap from eBay in “as is” condition, but it seems to be working great! With this acquisition, I…
I keep accumulating more and more hardware, and my office is beginning to overflow with boxes, tools, and wires. I need to start turning this pile of parts into an actual machine ASAP. The first of my recent acquisitions was…
While hunting for my soldering iron, I found my first digital electronics project gathering dust in a box. I thought I’d thrown it out long ago, so I was happily surprised to see it. It’s not much to look at–…
I received an email from CPU-builder Dieter Müller, describing his very impressive M02 project to build a custom CPU binary compatible with the 6502, using standard 74LS and similar parts. In short, a project quite similar to my own, except…
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