It took James Newman more than one and a half years of actually building progress and more than that (thinking about it started in 2011) for designing his own Megaprocessor using transistors.
For like EUR 50000 and a lot of “learning opportunities” he built himself a room full of visual computing: you can see the LEDs on all the PCB boards indicating exactly what’s going on (heck: he even made the RAM visualise an actual tetris implementation).
All for the sake of understanding transistors and discrete logic after which things got out of hand.
Hopefully a tech museum will buy this.
His site as a truckload of information, for instance the Source: Megaprocessor – FAQ: good/bad/ugly linking to lots of technical details and decisions made (like throwing out surface mount components but using lead based solder or having dual output logic).
There’s a lot of video too (like Megaprocessor – How ?) but – especially these weeks – the downloading is slow, to it’s faster and easier to watch his Youtube playlists:
They are currently 6 videos each, but he has uploaded more videos and is working on more.
Finally, James even built an assembler for this 16-bit processor. How cool is that!
–jeroen
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