Links

This is just a collection of links to pages that I've found useful in this project so far

YouTube:

  • Obviously, Ben Eater's 8-bit computer series, the original inspiration for this project.
  • James Sharman's Pipelined 8-bit computer series. Lots of interesting info on how he's gone about building a much more complicated computer, including pipelining. Currently a mix of PCBs and breadboards.
  • Robert Baruch's Let's make a RISC-V processor series, an ongoing(?) series in which he builds a full RISC-V implementation on PCBs (no FPGAs involved).

Reddit:

Other links:

  • Magic-1. This was the first homebrew CPU I've seen that had gone as far as being able to run Minix
  • Dieter Muller's set of articles on building an ALU from multiplexers. This is the approach I took for my breadboard ALU.
  • Kicad Replicate layout plugin. Very useful when you have repetitive layouts (register board, I'm looking at you)
  • A useful page on add-with-carry and sub-with-borrow implementations of ALUs

Assembly, microcode etc:

  • CustomASM, an assembler that lets you specify your own instruction set. Missing a few features that would be useful in larger projects, but excellent for tinkering with small programs
  • A very helpful post on porting LCC to a 16-bit MIPS-like architecture
  • An example of a machine description file for the LCC compiler

LLVM:

  • CPU0 LLVM backend, a very detailed walkthrough of building a custom LLVM backend for a 32-bit MIPS-like system