Homegrown Computers

That's very nice project. Reminds me of Ben Eater's YT series. I'm always fascinated by guys doing troubleshooting with oscilloscope, checking what data in currently on bus..
 
Thanks, _martin. It was inspired by Ben Eater's content, mentioned him on the page. So much of great stuff now on YT.
 
There is also the "NDR Kleincomputer", which was part of a TV educational program. Started with a Z80, ended with a MC680x0 CPU board. Great times. I bought some of the books for this out of nostalgia, maybe one day I can roll my own. But that may well be a FPGA with my own CPU design. One day, you all know what that means.
 
Have a 6502 based board I built, still need to design a proper PCB for it, it's only on a breadboard now. Was originally based on Ben Eater's kit (I actually bought it, can highly recommend it). Then bought a bunch more components through Mouser and changed the design a lot. Used a GAL 22v10 for better/easier address decoding instead of a bunch of logic chips. Programming the GAL was, erm, challenging. The software is terribly old and buggy. Not a lot of documentation too so I had to solve a bunch of vague error messages before I got it to work.

As for 'old' computers, I own a C-64 (old 'breadbox' model; something's broken, haven't had the time to fix it), C64c (new 'amiga' style model; works 100%; have a Ultimate II+ in it), an SX-64 (portable C64; missing keyboard unfortunately), 128D (US 110V; don't have a converter but should work). And some Amigas; a 500, 1200 and 4000/030. Also have a ZX-Spectrum and an Apple ][gs. I think that's everything? Currently on the lookout for a nice 'old' PC (486 or early Pentium, not sure yet; want to use it for some retro gaming).

The fun part about the 6502, 65816 and Z80 CPUs is that you can still buy them, they're still being produced. So you don't have to go through eBay or Ali searching for old chips (and likely get fake ones). You can just order them from a proper place like Mouser or Digikey.
 
Well, I built Z80, 6809 and 680x0 computers with wirewrap back in the day. The only documentation I had to go on was the docs from Zilog and Motorola. The Z80 was wonderful to work with. The 68K of course was a lot more involved but, again, a joy to put together and program (only in assembly of course).
 
drhowarddrfine said:
Well, I built Z80, 6809 and 680x0 computers with wirewrap back in the day.
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I have one wirewrap Z80 at home; it actually has a MMU and 512 KB of paged memory (the MMU is a 20ns dual-port SRAM chip). The remainder of my Z80 boards are all using commercial PB boards, then assembled ourselves. A friend still has a 6809 board, the Eurocom.

The 68K of course was a lot more involved but, again, a joy to put together and program (only in assembly of course).
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Our neighbor Nick was the architect of the 68K; he sadly passed away last summer after a tragic accident.
 
I used to be able to look at that and pick out most of what is what and which is which in that. Now I'm only sure of the registers and, uh, now I forgot.
 
ralphbsz said:
Our neighbor Nick was the architect of the 68K
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That's the cool thing about living in the valley. You can run into people like that just walking down the street. Like the time this guy fumbled a box trying to get on the airport shuttle. He looked up at me and I helped him. Yeah, I recognized Ed Catmull.
 
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