My Home-Built TTL Computer Processor | Hacker News Reader

My Home-Built TTL Computer Processor

cpuville.com

62 pointsch27 comments

Wow, a webring widget at the bottom. That's been a while.

I don't know why you're downvoted, webrings are great, it's sort of a list of curated related content. I loved browsing those when they were more common.

Ever since speaking up on one of the threads about encryption/terrorism my comments have been more or less structurally downvoted by one particular user (confirmed). I'm fine with that, it's not going to make me shut up, if they feel better about it then that's mostly their problem, not mine.

What did you say to get that kind of crazy reaction?

[NB Having been a web user since the very early days I had encountered web rings and had completely forgotten about them]

Take your pick.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10562679

You just made my morning.

How did you confirm? Speak to dang?

Yes.

Strange, I didn't see you saying anything particularly provocative in that thread you cited- though there were a lot of comments so maybe I missed one. Oh well, like you say if it makes that user feel better then no matter.

They're probably doing you more good than harm. Nothing attracts upvotes faster than an unwarranted negative score.

(shameless plug)

I totally agree, that was awesome to discover random websites. I think that there's still a place for webrings these days, so I'm creating the webring club. Feel free to subscribe on http://webring.club/ or shoot me an email (address in profile) if you're interested in exchanging ideas!

I got "Sorry, MailChimp couldn't validate your email. Try again?"

Thanks for the heads-up!

For some reason mailchimp was returning 403s from heroku, this must be related to this morning's outage. This is fixed and I added the emails that failed.

They are! But it's a rather off-topic top-level comment so I understand people downvoting it.

Also, no ads. How on earth can the page even exist? How on earth was the person motivated to create this, write about this and even keep it online without having a paywall or advertisements? Unbelievable!

Here is another home-built CPU made from 74HC (TTL-compatible CMOS) integrated circuits:

http://www.mycpu.eu/

The author gave a talk about it in our local hackerspace back in 2009. Fascinating stuff.

http://video.kiberpipa.org/pot_mycpu_dennis_kuschel/?q=mycpu

This reminds me of the Duo Adept[1], a full TTL computer with video output, keyboard input and a homebrew operating system. All built by a teenager in his spare time.

1: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qYvr0b8jqbg

Aptly named.

This is something I still have on my bucket list. I remember as a kid looking at the electronics catalogue eyeing the z80 chip thinking to myself "I'm gonna build a gameboy!!1" because my friend had a gameboy and I wanted to join in on the pokemon fun!

Glad to see it's not just me that thinks things like that... the problem is I know it would take me forever, and when I eventually did it, everyone I know would just say "Why? It can't even do [insert killer app here]" and that would be that!

I was also thinking of constructing a CPU in this fashion using the ideas from Mill CPU folks.

I will probably never have enough time to go through this, which is sad.

A Mill-like architecture would require a huge register file (alternatively, a huge shift register). Not sure it's a good idea for a TTL design. Accumulator architectures are better suited.

It would seem 4 4-bit word register files are all you could obtain from TI (http://www.ti.com/product/sn74ls670); I haven't dug deeper, but yeah as a bread-board layout you would need a lot of surface area to simulate even the smallest Mill. Cool idea though.

Wow ... remember when "build a computer" didn't mean "order a motherboard and a disk drive, and make sure you get the right size power supply."

Here's another home-built TTL computer: http://www.homebrewcpu.com

Very cool. Reminds me of _The Soul of a New Machine_, with all the painstakingly assembled discrete logic.

The computer in The Soul of a New Machine also used some of the first programmable logic chips, it wasn't all TTL.

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