Computer Project BLOG #1, Weeks 1-3

Week 1, September 5th-11th

Week 1 is when the initial research into the project started.
Earlier in the week I would design the general layout of the computer as a whole, how each component of the computer would interact with each other, playing with ideas and seeing what as possible.

A demo image made in GIMP based on the design of the PPU

Within the first week the rough expectations were already set as to the capabilities of the computer would be, it was going be large, slow and not even come close to anything remotely modern, it would take an extremely long amount of time and effort to achieve. Knowing this, we kept going, even if it fails it will be interesting to work on and I would learn a lot.

By the end of the week, I already had a general design for the computer made and i knew roughly how it all worked and how the end product would look like. I had made the beginnings of a emulator and assembler and the first schematics and circuit board design for the ALU.

Early design of the computer.

ALU Schematic (as of 25th), Some parts of the schematic are hidden out of view.

I had designed the instructions for the system to use, trying to optimise it as much as possible for hardware simplicity. For every instruction i thought of how it would be represented in hardware, and if it was easy to implement or if there was a more efficient way of doing it.

Week 2, September 12th-18th

Early into week 2, the software side of things had been turned into something actually functional. There was now a working emulator with picture output, I made a few programs to test things and everything seemed to work as expected. Coding in assembly with the extremely limited instruction set is hell, so it was decided that a higher level language and a compiler should be designed later on to make things easier.

The first time that the emulator successfully produced a picture output.