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Comment by LeonenTheDK | Hacker News Reader

I've been following his videos for some time now. He also built an 8-bit CPU from scratch on breadboards, as well as a 6502 based computer also on bread boards. He's recently started the process of using the video card he made to output video from the 6502 computer.

His videos are interesting and informative, and while he does offer kits to build all this stuff from his site, the part lists are there should you want to source your own (not always easy if you try to do it on the cheap and get your parts from the likes of Ali Express and Ebay).

Overall his projects are fascinating for anyone with interest in retro computing or learning how computers work at the lowest level, and the videos are easy to follow and more than just a "how to put this together" tutorial.

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> Overall his projects are fascinating for anyone with interest in retro computing or learning how computers work at the lowest level

I'm on the RAM-building portion of the 8-bit breadboard computer for exactly this reason. I wanted to bridge the gap between (this is an electric circuit that lights an LED) and (this is how you can take a simple inverter and a logic gate to build a D flip flop, which can power registers, SRAM, and more) and (this is an 8-bit example of a Von Neumann Architecture computer).

His videos are perfect for that. Very well made and I don't have to take classes in circuit design or digital logic control & design at a college to learn the high level of how this works.

Ben Eater's entire catalog is gold, he gets right to the meat of things, clearly explains what's happening, and makes the subject matter accessible and entertaining.

His 8-bit CPU series made me finally understand how microcode works. His videos are very clear and well explained.

I will reiterate this. I dropped out of a CS program and had just a little knowledge, but I feel like this finally made the penny drop.

I'm curious how well that works out, building something that complex on a breadboard. I had an FM radio project that gave me a lot of trouble until I realized the breadboard was introducing a lot of parasitic capacitance.

It works well for a learning project that doesn't push clock rates. This lets the nose introduced by the breadboard to settle before each clock edge. Also, bypass capacitors are key.

I got caught up in all his videos and had the same question. Fortunately, he has a dedicated video where he answers this with testing on the scope: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCbAafKLqC8

tl;dr is what the sibling comment already explained: low clock rates.

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