I want to build my own DIY computer from scratch, but I don't really know where to start. The main purpose of it is to learn more about computers and how it all works down there. I'm confident with logic gates, boolean algebra, not so with prototyping. I watched Ben Eater's videos about his project, as well as some other videos to similar topic. What books/other materials will be helpful? What is the starting point for such project should be? Is it better to pick up something like 65c02 and build around it or made everything by myself?
>I want to build my own DIY computer from scratch, but I don't really know where to start.
somebody post the bingo card
https://eater.net/6502
Was about to suggest that, that dude is doing god's job.
> from scratch
> pre-made CPU with 10s of thousands of transistors
Ngmi
and whatever OP does, he needs to absolutely plug his thousands of transistors into solderless breadboards like his pic.
Not really like that when I mean "from scratch", I don't want to use discreet transistors, or I'll never do it. I want to use ICs for this.
I never thought of this, I'm mostly familliar with digital ones so that's why I want to build one like this. Any suggestions about analog one?
Well the thing is they're in a way simpler but also more complex depending what you want.
The simplest analog computer example I can think of would be the slide rule.
The point is that an analog computer is just a device that varies continuously unlike digital logic.
>The simplest analog computer example I can think of would be the slide rule.
ah yes, the literal boomer being literally stupid. I bet you got used to eyes glazing over when you pontificate about 50 years ago.
Refute me homosexual, don't just call people names.
A slide rule is not a simple device but it is a simple example of one.
No thats no their definition.
An analogue computer is a computer that builds a physical analogue to whatever discrete problem you want to compute. Be it pulleys, complex water systems or analog electrical circuits. The theoretiocally infinite variability of working with non discrete states as such is just a side effect.
In the slide rule example the graticules have the operations encoded in their varying distances. It would still be an analogue computer even if there were a finite number of ratcheting graticules on it.
tl,dr: An analog computer translates an abstract problem into a physical one. piggybacking of laws and relationships to perform computation.
I've built analog breadboard computers. Here's one generating a circle using the pythagorean theorem.
An analog "computer" isn't a computer in the modern sense. It's a circuit that solves a single equation using a sequence of things like voltage adders, voltage dividers, logarithmic amplifiers, etc. Once you understand how to do simple things like multiplying and subtracting voltages with op-amps you can build a circuit that solves most equations.
If you start getting into it you might stumble on analog multiplier chips, then realize they cost hundreds of dollars. You don't need these. You can do multiplaction with log and antolog opamp circuits.
An analog computer is really not a beginner project. Start with something much simpler like a headphone amplifier.
That's insane. Reminds me of Scanimate. I've pondered building something like that with Eurorack VCO modules which have a hard sync input, so you can generate ramps. I hate breadboards.
>he thinks making his own circuits makes something analog
Getaloadofthisguy.papertape
I'm collecting videos on true "from scratch" computer development. Here's what I've got, so far:
(Making purified wafers is the missing step)
>Tl;dw
You can extract and refine silicon from stuff around you, then etch patterns into it using not-too-expensive stuff at home that's easy to buy for regular consumers. They won't be nearly as powerful, efficient (computationally or with energy consumption), or small as the current market provides, but that may be a matter of time before people overcome that using cheap accessible methods, as well.
> using pre-created silicon
This is diy, not “find it yourself”
To truly build your own you should be creating the silicon from quarks and gluons to make hydrogen, and then turn the hydrogen into Si by beaming it with neutrons like we did back in the 70’s. Good times.
The leak is not really fixed until you manufacture your own pipes.
Just how far down are you going. Every gate is gonna be 3 or 4 transistors, plus associated parts:)
Make an analogue computer instead, it'll be more fun.
Wrong board
PrepHole is way too stupid for this stuff. I used to browse there a lot but it's all threads about consumer electronics and beginner programming these days, and troll/jokes threads of course. whenever a thread about actually making something with electronics pops up they point the OP to PrepHole
>The main purpose of it is to learn more about computers and how it all works down there.
>Is it better to pick up something like 65c02 and build around it or made everything by myself?
If you want something you can call your own, develop your own instruction set instead of trying to emulate an existing processor.
>Not really like that when I mean "from scratch", I don't want to use discreet transistors, or I'll never do it. I want to use ICs for this.
Just so you know what you're in for, It can take several hundred discrete logic ICs to make a primitive processor capable of running a calculator. This is how computers were built in the 1960s.
One of the first, if not the first, IC processors was the 4004 and it had a few thousand transistors.
> use ICs
The maximum “pre-made” complexity that I’d accept as “from scratch” is using something like a 74181.
> 4004
The 4004 is a pre-made CPU. Might as well just buy an old C64 and play with that.
“From scratch” means that it doesn’t have a pre-existing instruction set designed by someone else.
— t. /mcg/
>want to build an MSX2 clone
>find all the needed parts beside the VDP for around $50
great !
>find the VDP chip alone cost more than $50
>no garentee any of the douzens of chips work
>if a single ship is crap the whole system won't work and i'd be wasting over 100 bux on nothing
i really want to do it, but im too short on cash to gamble on ebay selles
Have you ever played this?
It made me fall in love with computing architecture, even when sometimes it is ambiguous in explaining stuff.
Simulators are probably the most cost effecting thing you can do.
I'll give it a try, seems very interesting
What amount of effort and time you put into this? Looks scary and interesting af
I'll think about both options, thanks for information, but what is a good MSX kit out there? Quick search results in GR8Bit and Omega MSX, but maybe it's better to save money for Rosco. As for assembly I'll be learning it at uni, motorolla one, so it'll go perfectly if I get my hands on it.
Yeah, logic ICs look like my way to go, they're fun and understandable, almost like lego but with electricity.
i made ben's 6502 project a couple years ago, and i also made a basic microcontroller with a 32-bit ST chip. the 6502 was fun and easy, especially with the ben video, but the ST project is definitely not for the faint of heart. no single-step debugging, theres like 14 steps you have to do before you get even one hint of feedback whether or not youre on the right track, and the manual is like 1600 pages long. very proud of myself for getting it working tho.
the 6502 manual is like, what, 50 pages? super easy.
heres a pic of the ST. i used a header only printf implementation and wrote the put() function to output on the chip's UART. the pi then picked it up and printed it on my desktop. quite proud of that one.
Checked. looks great, keep it up brother. I only just noticed I can snap breadboards together so can fit an esp8266 lol.
>looks great, keep it up brother.
thanks but i took that thing apart years ago, i used the MCU for my senior design project to save me the $10 of buying a new one lmao. iirc it was an STM32L462.
Check out gigatron.io which is also a kit.
https://hothardware.com/news/uk-man-builds-massive-computer-out-of-discrete-transistors-to-play-tetris-and-other-classic-games
I recommend the Rosco M68K kit. 68K is the absolute best architecture if by chance you want to do assembler. Also, when you get bored with that, you can run EmuTOS on it and play with Atari ST stuff.
Otherwise maybe get an MSX2 kit? Again, when you get bored with it, it'll at least play games.
There's CP/M Z80 stuff. I dislike it. No one has a good 80-column solution for it, and the crux of CP/M was 80-column software.
>Rosco M68K
>Regular price: £149.99
>MC68010 16/32-bit CPU
>1MB RAM
>512KB Flash ROM (Up to 1MB supported)
>On-board UART (115200 BPS as standard)
>SD Card support (requires 5V Arduino-compatible SD adapter, not supplied)
Not OP, but even though the idea of assembling a computer from scratch sounds interesting, I don't think I'd be willing to drop 150 pounds for something that's got inferior specs to a Raspberry Pi Pico in all but storage capacity.
At least you’ll know how it works and that the chinese aren’t listing to your conversations.
You can’t know that they aren’t on a raspberry pi.
>You can’t know that they aren’t on a raspberry pi.
If you don't know how to monitor a network why do you have an opinion?
If security really matters, don't use a computer to communicate since the five eyes pwn the backbones.
Why would anyone use the internet for anything compromising in the first place? The best security is to resist temptation and not follow the herd.
https://nandgame.com/ is a pretty good resource to learn from, It guides you through all the steps of building a computer starting from relays
Personally, I've been working on building one in minecraft. All the ALU is missing is a circuits for bitshifting and jumps and it should be ready for programming
i'd love to build an MSX replica but there are too many fake chips out there
an MSX requires many chips to work if any of em turn out to be fake/defective you can kiss your project goodbye
allot of time and money wasted
Hi OP. I was once played with redstone, I watched all of ben eaters videos, tried ordering a bunch of discreet parts to plug into a breadboard, etc. I ended up going to school for this
I would not try to learn going the ben eater route with discreet parts or ICs. You will swamp yourself with a couple hundreds of dollars in parts, reading each datasheet, and it wont turn on when you run into parasitic capacitance on the breadboard or some shit (idk I'm not a EE).
What you need to do is get an FPGA and toolchain and learn how how to implement things in verilog. If you're not familiar verilog basically lets you define registers and wires on an FPGA with a C-like syntax. You can first simulate(!) verilog code on your computer and then synthesize(!) it onto the FPGA to get any hardware you want in real life. Hopefully you can see how buying 1 $50 fpga is better than drowning in 100s of different parts from weird vendors for $$$. Learn how verilog works with a
For the actual processor design a starting point I recommend is with choosing an ISA. this is like x86 or ARM, I recommend riscV or MIPs (what we used in school) because they are much simpler. What you can look up for inspo is you want to design a Single Cycle MIPs processor. Then you can work your way into pipelining, caching, multicore, etc. MANY college courses follow this route and you can maybe follow one if it's open source
Here are some resources you can look up:
These lectures look great: https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse378/10sp/lectures/
Here's a book I used in college, you can get it on libgen: Computer Organization and Design MIPS Edition: The Hardware/Software Interface
I haven't explored the game turing complete. nand game is a nice game, but not something to build a whole project on. Minecraft works and is fun but you're limited by your redstone and creative building tools knowledge as well as compute speed.
Yeah I'm a final year Computer Engineering student and FPGAs are definitely the best way to go if what you want is to make your own processor, they aren't the best if what you want is something that you can show off and looks cool but it's what is used in the real world when you need to prototype some chip, if you have the money the basys 3 development board is pretty comfy
I completed turing complete up until assembly challenges, which is optional.
The game leaves you reinventing everything, it's challenging and sometimes ambiguous when explaining stuff (at least for someone like me who never touched logic circuitry before) but still satisfying, you build an 8-bit computer starting from scratch, you also build another one that is more sophisticated than the previous.
The problem is it won't give you a good overview on how irl components work, so you end up building memories out of a "delay" component, and counters out of adders and a registers. Some components like the "program" one is given without understanding how it works, and irl problems like how to deal with flipflops saving stuff are not present at all.
I say OP is far off better getting a simulator like logisim and a good information source, then moving to an fpga and languages like you said.
Still, turing complete is a fun puzzling toy.
>I want to build my own DIY computer from scratch, but I don't really know where to start.
We have a FAQ:
https://wiki.installgentoo.com/wiki//aig/_Alternative_ISA_General
This is a nice book about this topic. It has a chapter on building a digital computer with a schematic (using 7400 series logic chips) and an in-depth explanation of how it works.
depends on what it is you want to learn about computers. 6502 will give you the basics for data flowing between components. IF you want to learn about inner workings of data proesing you're better off learning assembly, and 6502 is also a great starting point there.
That being said making a computer from scratch when you don't actually even know where to start indicates that what you're looking to do wpould be tillting at the proverbial windmills. You should probably start with something simpler, like re-creating what's already out there, and trust me DIY kits do exist, as do replacement chips for what's no longer available. Apple-1 should be entirely doable one way or another tho.
>I want to build my own DIY computer from scratch, but I don't really know where to start.
BINGO! filled on the first sentance, good job for being a PrepHole meme OP.
Get a FPGA.
Preferably something that works with the open stack, such as iCE40 UP5K or LP8K.
I'm building a 16-bit TTL CPU right now. In my opinion, decide right now what you want it to do and focus on breaking things up into modules.
Start with Logisim and FPGA (Verilog) designs. Write test procedures for individual modules and the complete system.
Begin implementing modules on breadboards and designing actual circuits in KiCad. At this point, start looking up prices of components for each module. If you get discouraged on the price, stick with only designing in FPGA.
Manufacture PCBs or use protoboards. Ditch breadboards as fast as you can to get rid of annoying capacitance and connection problems. Re-test modules using test procedures created during first design phase.
Creating separate "test harness" circuits could also prove useful if you screw up and fry an IC at some point.
Take everything one step at a time and don't rush anything. This will take a while, but I think its worth the torture
https://www.homebrewcpu.com/
I've also wanted to build one for years now but if your purpose is really
>The main purpose of it is to learn more about computers and how it all works down there
Then, like other posters said, just designing a minecraft/factorio/dwarf fortress/(any turing complete game) computer will get you most of the way there instead of spending $200 in parts before you even have a vision of what do you want