Build Your Own PDP-11.

"While I was doing this I was (am) also working on a "real" cpu at a real company doing much the same thing, only on a larger and more grand scale. And my role is much smaller. But I've learned a lot from my day-gig and applied it to this project."

What I wonder about is how much his experience of doing the whole thing on a smaller scale affected his day job, I'd hope that doing the whole thing by himself would give a completely different perspective on the work that he's doing for a living.

One of these days I'm going to get an FPGA development kit and get my hands dirty. The temptation is very large. (I'm holding off because I feel that it might be just too big of a time sink).

I like his debugging technique too, a clock divider to slow down the CPU and a bunch of led displays to show the PC.

When working on one of my own projects I used a bunch of led's hooked up to the printer port, an out command in the main loop would indicate where the program was (or crashed...).