8-bit computer update

Duration: 6 min
Chapters: 7
Intro
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Ever since I uploaded a few videos of this 8-bit programmable computer,
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that I built a while ago, I've gotten a lot of questions about it.
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I wanted to answer a few of the most common questions,
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and definitely by far the most common question,
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is, "can you show us how to build it?" or "do you have schematics for this?"
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Or something along those lines. The answer is, believe it or not, I actually don't have schematics
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for this thing, I never sat down and drew out a full schematic.
Schematic
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Because of how modular everything is, or how modular this architecture is,
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I was able to build each piece of it by itself, and build it, and test it, and experiment with
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one module at a time, before I had to put it all together. It wasn't really until all the pieces came together
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that I really had to be a little bit more thoughtful about how it was all going to work.
Book recommendation
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For that I had this really good model to follow in this book that I really recommend,
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"Digital Computer Electronics", by Albert Paul Malvino.
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Unfortunately, I think the book is out of print, but hopefully you can find a used copy online
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or something. This book has an architecture... has a couple architectures.
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Architecture
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One is the SAP-1, which is, "simple as possible". The goal is to be a very simple computer architecture,
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that demonstrates all the crucial ideas behind computer operation
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without being any more complicated than it needs to be.
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Components
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The architecture that they have in here, is basically the model that I followed,
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what I based this computer on. So you can see that all of the same components are there.
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There's a program counter here, there's the memory address register,
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the 16 bytes of memory that are used, programmable read only memory,
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I've got RAM but, same difference, as far as the operation is concerned.
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An instruction register, the control unit, which is all this stuff down here,
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and you can see that they have all these signals going out, that come back in
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to all the other components, and that's what all these yellow wires are.
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They're all the control signals. They come from the control unit and go out
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to all the different pieces to orchestrate everything.
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The accumulator, which is the A register here. The ALU, which is the arithmetic
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logic unit, which in this computer, just adds and subtracts.
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Those are the only arithmetic operations it knows how to do.
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And then the B register. The A and the B register are the inputs for the arithmetic.
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And the output register, they have a binary display, I've got a decimal display
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which I thought was a little nicer.
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That's one enhancement that I made.
Enhancements
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I made a few other enhancements to this as well, primarily around the instruction set
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and what you can actually do with it.
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The model here in the book, it talks about the instructions having a
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"load A" instruction, an add instruction, subtract, output, and halt, and that's it.
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I added a couple other things. I added a load immediate, which just lets you
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save a little bit of memory, if you wanted to load a particular value into the A register.
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And then a "store A" command, which in addition to the "load A," which loads the accumulator
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from memory, you can store what's in the accumulator to memory.
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So that let's you build a little bit more complex programs.
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I also added jump instructions, which I thought were pretty important
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for a programmable computer. There's a regular jump instruction,
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there's also a conditional jump instruction, that jumps when the carry bit is set,
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anytime the addition over flows.
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So you might still be wondering, can I just tell you how to build this thing already,
Future plans
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can you draw up a schematic or something like that? Well, I've got some good news.
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That is exactly what I plan to do, to make a bunch of videos, that go through every step of the process.
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I am planning to actually build a whole new copy of this computer from scratch,
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and have videos of all of it. The bad news is that it's going to take a while.
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I don't have a ton of free time, unfortunately, but my personal goal is to make one video a week,
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at a minimum. So we'll see how well that goes, but even with that, I want to make sure I'm covering
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everything from first principles, not leaving any mystery about why things work the way that they do.
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I don't wanna ask you to take anything on faith, but going step by step,
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probably means it's going to take a while to get to everything. So at least...
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at least a few months. Probably longer. I hope that it will be worth the wait. My goal, and I'm convinced that
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anyone can build this computer. As long as you're patient enough to wire it all up, carefully,
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and you have the persistence to troubleshoot the inevitable wrong connections,
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or broken connections or something. I'm convinced that anyone can build this and really understand
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at a very deep level, how a computer works, by building this. Even if you, don't have any experience with
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this sort of thing, or with electronics. In fact I really hope, I'm really looking forward to that happening, and
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people building these things, and improving on it even. So, I think for the next videos, I'm going to be
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traveling over the next week, so it may be in a couple weeks before I can get the next video up.
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My goal is to just start focusing on the clock, as the first steps, and walk through
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building this, the clock circuit, from scratch. There's a couple interesting things going on here.
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The clock, of course, coordinates everything in the computer, the timing of everything.
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In this case, you can adjust the speed of the clock, you can see here I'm slowing it down,
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so everything else is running slower. You can also stop the clock, and then step one step at a time,
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which is very useful for troubleshooting something, if something isn't working, which inevitably,
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if you build this you're going to run into a point where something isn't working, and you need to
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go step by step. A couple features that are of the clock, is that it uses the 5-5-5 timers,
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so I will go through how those work, and they're being used in a couple different applications,
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in the clock circuit. So, I think that that's the next thing that I'll do, the next set of videos.
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You can look forward to seeing those. I hope you're as excited as I am about this.
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Again, I ask for your patience, it's going to take a while to get through it all,
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but I hope it will be worth it. If this is exciting to you, please give this video a thumbs up,
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and subscribe to the channel, tell all your friends, cause if you like what you see,
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knowing that people find these videos valuable, is really motivating to me, so
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subscribing and watching the videos, is honestly the best way to make sure that I
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keep working on them. Thanks for watching.