An 8-bit minicomputer with a fully custom architecture
1–10 of 33 posts
Re: An 8-bit minicomputer with a fully custom architecture
#2Somebody is way too into solderless breadboards.
I can see building a CPU from smaller components, but not dealing with loose connections in that mess.
Re: An 8-bit minicomputer with a fully custom architecture
#3Slightly off topic, but I'm looking forward to FPGA tooling improving to the point where I can build a fantasy personal computer based on dragging and dropping architectural components into a design that compiles to hardware.
I'm definitely too lazy to design from scratch or build by hand, and there's already so much out there designed for FPGAs, so just hoping one day it may be plug and play like the Mister is for entire systems.
Re: An 8-bit minicomputer with a fully custom architecture
#4I really enjoy when these hobby projects get posted. Tinkering for the sake of it is so much fun. Thanks for sharing
Re: An 8-bit minicomputer with a fully custom architecture
#5Somebody is way too into solderless breadboards. I can see building a CPU from smaller components, but not dealing with loose connections in that mess.
Reminds me of the old MIT 6.004 nerd kits. (Roughly a suitcase-sized briefcase with breadboards and TTL components to build a CPU with.)
Re: An 8-bit minicomputer with a fully custom architecture
#6Slightly off topic, but I'm looking forward to FPGA tooling improving to the point where I can build a fantasy personal computer based on dragging and dropping architectural components into a design that compiles to hardware. I'm definitely too lazy to design from scratch or build by hand, and there's already so much out there designed for FPGAs, so just hoping one day it may be plug and play like the Mister is for e…
Quite possibly I misunderstand on what level you mean that, but I think the devil is in the details, and "drag and drop your computer architecture" seems as unrealistic in practice as "drag and drop your application" turned out to be.
Unless you mean "architectural components" at such a high level that you don't mean to define (say) a CPU architecture, but basically just adding "device" soft cores to a common bus (or multiple) and configure their parameters, and where they are mapped in the address space and so on. In which case, that pretty much exists already today!
Quirks aside, you can totally drag, say, soft cores for a CPU, a few 16550A serial ports, video output devices, ethernet controllers, USB controllers--whatever you can think of essentially--into a Vivado block design, attach them to an AXI bus (whose structure you can also define graphically with many bus components to chose from), configure the memory map (or accept the defaults), and have "a computer".
Depending on the nature of your computer it might not even be much work to then get it to boot into Linux through U-Boot, with a device tree generated by the toolkit.
But I can imagine a simpler, "dumbed down" (in a useful way) more dedicated piece of software where this could be possible without knowing much of anything about FPGAs, yeah.
Re: An 8-bit minicomputer with a fully custom architecture
#7I kind of want to try to make a "74 series logic" RISC V CPU at some point so I can inherit the compiler.
It's rough building the larger systems though. All the early logic is still around for the most part, but most of the "medium integration" parts have disappeared. Things like register files and bitslice ALUs. (74x181, etc.)
Re: An 8-bit minicomputer with a fully custom architecture
#8Slightly off topic, but I'm looking forward to FPGA tooling improving to the point where I can build a fantasy personal computer based on dragging and dropping architectural components into a design that compiles to hardware. I'm definitely too lazy to design from scratch or build by hand, and there's already so much out there designed for FPGAs, so just hoping one day it may be plug and play like the Mister is for e…
This would be wonderful - I hacked on a CPU architecture and brought it to an FPGA by manually converting a Logisim [1] schematic to VHDL. It's still terribly buggy.
Maybe it'd be possible to write an integration for the (unmaintained) Logisim to export the schematic to a HDL of some sort to get close.
Re: An 8-bit minicomputer with a fully custom architecture
#9Somebody is way too into solderless breadboards. I can see building a CPU from smaller components, but not dealing with loose connections in that mess.
Ben Eater had a whole video on why he encourages building a breadboard computer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCbAafKLqC8
A lot of people have taken what they've learned and moved on to designing their own PCB versions. You can see some of them here: https://www.reddit.com/r/beneater
Re: An 8-bit minicomputer with a fully custom architecture
#10Slightly off topic, but I'm looking forward to FPGA tooling improving to the point where I can build a fantasy personal computer based on dragging and dropping architectural components into a design that compiles to hardware. I'm definitely too lazy to design from scratch or build by hand, and there's already so much out there designed for FPGAs, so just hoping one day it may be plug and play like the Mister is for e…
It's not a GUI, but Clash's ideals (aka Haskell's) are exactly what you're looking for. Small, composable components.