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Hardware

Build Your Own Computer 579

Posted by michael from the from-scratch dept.
fixit! writes "This guy built his own CPU and VGA card. The site is in German. Here is the Babelfish translation of the site."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Build Your Own Computer More

Build Your Own Computer

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  • Babelfish (Score:5, Funny)

    by Bob McCown ( 8411 ) on Friday June 06, 2003 @10:10PM (#6136755)
    "This guy built his own CPU and VGA card. The site is in German. Here is the Babelfish translation of the site."

    My Hovercraft is full of eels!
    I will not buy this *tobacconist's*, it is scratched.
    Do you waaaaant...do you waaaaaant...to come back to my place, bouncy bouncy?
    Drop your panties, Sir William; I cannot wait 'til lunchtime.

  • In other news... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 06, 2003 @10:12PM (#6136764)
    ...A German housefire injures a computer hacker working on a weird project. Noone else was hurt.

  • All the news that's (Score:5, Funny)

    by Aexia ( 517457 ) on Friday June 06, 2003 @10:13PM (#6136769)
    Last change: 16.10.2002

    fit to print! That's my slashdot!
    • The tenth day of the month of Hexidecember? Is that some EU thing?

      • Re:All the news that's (Score:3, Informative)

        by dirvish ( 574948 )
        Yes, it is. They often use day/month/year instead of month/day/year

        • Re:All the news that's (Score:5, Informative)

          by RevAaron ( 125240 ) <revaaron AT hotmail DOT com> on Friday June 06, 2003 @11:38PM (#6137113) Homepage
          Umm, also note that it was day.month.year- *periods* not slashes. According to worldwide standards, a period as a delineator denotes that it is in that format. Some folks will write the European format with slashes as well.

          I am not sure why we americans use our silly middle-endian format. Seems to me little-to-big or big-to-little (like the Japanese with 2003-10-24) makes more sense than middle-little-big.

          Isn't it great when some schmuck thinks he's coming up with a great joke? Ooooh, Aexia managed to make a dis on Slashdot's editing. Slashdot's mistakes are so few and far between that we can all just ignore that this one was just plain incorrect. :)

      • Re:All the news that's (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Sharth ( 621005 )
        basically, everyone but us americans do the date correctly. that format is dd/mm/yy
        • Even so, if we ever need a name for a new month, I nominate "Hexidecember". It has a nice ring to it, and my trademark registration has already been filed.

        • 'correctly'? (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Trepidity ( 597 )
          It's simply a convention. Of the six possible ways to arrange month, day, and year, three are in widespread use: mm/dd/yy, dd/mm/yy, and yy/mm/dd (yy might be yyyy as well).

          The US standard makes sense in some ways: mm/dd is what you commonly write, with an implicit year (though this used to be more true in the past). This is in the normal sense-making big-endian format (rather than the crazy European little-endian format). Then when you want to denote the year explicitly you tack it into the end. This

      • Smarch! (Score:3, Funny)

        by RedCard ( 302122 )
        No! Smarch!

        Voice-Over (Marge) "It was the thirteenth hour of the thirteenth day of the thirteenth month... we were meeting to discuss the misprint in the school calendars"

        Homer (Grumbling): "...Lousy smarch weather..."
  • > I am conscious to me that it is a rather moved idea to build itself its own CCU With the hardware prices being so low at present - it IS a "moved" idea to build your own "CCU".

  • Babelfish has a way to go yet ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by pantropik ( 604178 ) on Friday June 06, 2003 @10:14PM (#6136775)
    From the article:
    I am conscious to me that it is a rather moved idea to build itself its own CCU but perhaps give it of people, which I can animate by this Website to something something similar or which even my CCU to copy to want. I will make everything available on this side gradually, which is needed for the reproduction of the CCU.


    Say that 3 times fast. Go ahead, I dare ya.

    The site is short on (understandable) details, but the thing apparently runs at a blistering 5Mhz which happens to be 5Mhz faster than anything I could ever build. Impressive, but I don't think AMD and Intel should be worried just yet. Via ... maybe.

  • Hieliche Schisse! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by EvilTwinSkippy ( 112490 ) <yoda AT etoyoc DOT com> on Friday June 06, 2003 @10:16PM (#6136787) Homepage Journal
    This guy is hard core. Look at his parts list: NAND gates, NOR gates. I don't care if this thing doesn't do more than run a train set, just the work that went into it was impressive.

    I remember playing with this stuff in VLSI. It's quite another thing to actually lay it out on hardware and wire the sucker up. He designed his own ALU, register paths, everything. God, and I can barly find time to play with my Mindstorms kit.

    Macht Spass Jung!

  • But does it run Linux!?!? (Score:3, Funny)

    by qwerty823 ( 126234 ) on Friday June 06, 2003 @10:17PM (#6136791)
    Sorry, someone was gonna ask, so it might as well be me. :-)
    • No (whack.) Just shut up and look at the pretty lights...

      I don't think it has nearly enough RAM, 256 opcodes, and 5 registers.

      Now, Minix on the other hand might be right up this guy's alley.

    • Sorry to Reply the reply...

      I'm picking through the original German. He actually has an emulator for the system. Technically you could run it under linux, and then modify it to the point that it would run Linux itself, and then run linux under it (at least in simulation.)

      By that point some guy in a black trenchcoat will be sitting in a room with a red and a blue pill for you to take...

    • No, but there is a port for NetBSD being worked on ;)

  • Technology moves ahead. (Score:5, Funny)

    by stph ( 541287 ) on Friday June 06, 2003 @10:17PM (#6136794) Homepage
    Holy 1970 Batman! The fiend has built his own computer! What nefarious plans he must have?
  • This guy has too much time on his hands.

    • Re:The real translation: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Vej ( 199488 )
      guess you've never been a programmer or engineer. you don't learn on the job :)
    • Nobody has too much time on their hands. I used to think I knew what that comment meant, but now I tend to classify it in the same bin as the comment "Whatever." A sort of brush off or dismisal from a person who does not understand what is being presented.

      I know I'm kind of babeling here, but telling a person who hacks up something like this that "They have too much time on their hands" is a very destructive comment. If I had heard that more when I was younger I would probably be flipping burgers now in

  • Apple ][ (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Goalie_Ca ( 584234 )
    By small modification of the hardware and another Microcode it is possible to copy other CPUs (e.g. 6502)

    Didn't steve wozniack use the 6502 back when he made the apple ][. Hell overall, i bet you steve used less chips too. With the technology we have today i'm sure steve could've designed an insane system for what it cost him back then.

  • Ahhh, (Score:5, Funny)

    by dirvish ( 574948 ) <dirvish@ f o undnews.com> on Friday June 06, 2003 @10:19PM (#6136809) Homepage Journal
    What a wimp. He didn't even make his own monitor!

  • NetBSD? (Score:5, Funny)

    by SHEENmaster ( 581283 ) <travis@utk. e d u> on Friday June 06, 2003 @10:20PM (#6136812) Homepage Journal
    How many more hours until NetBSD is ported? Or has it finally merged with OpenBeOS to become BeSD? Has this been abandoned?

    If the author is reading this: Good job; I hope to be able to do that some day.

  • Give the guy a break! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by PHAEDRU5 ( 213667 ) <instascreed.gmail@com> on Friday June 06, 2003 @10:25PM (#6136836) Homepage
    I remember dreaming my own CPU with bit slice logic. In fact, I'm pretty sure I can find some BYTE photocopies and other notes from my first attempt in like 1980, or so.

    I remember dreaming of building cards to hook to an S100 bus, including a Z-80 CPU with a ROM and redirection logic.

    I mean, I can see how things change. It's kind of interesting to see a whole generation of hardware hackers think in terms of gate arrays, or their children. Who never smelt solder.
    • This guy didn't go much further than what you were dreaming about. In fact, he didn't go much further than what undergrads were doing 6 years ago.

      He used 50 of the 74xx IC series chips to build this thing. It's hardly an example of how things change, it's an example of how things were!

      It would take a little less than a month to whip up what he did using an HDL and a small FPGA.
  • This is a typical double-E undergrad computer architecture design project. Or are other schools falling so far behind (I go a public school, and FAR from being the top student) that this stuff stands out as impressive?
    • This is a typical double-E undergrad computer architecture design project

      You have to also design an operating system and a basic interpretter for your hardware?

      • In some cases yes. Although we used a 8085 chip (did not build our own). This would be more like a senior project in undergrad. One I had never seen donw was a 8086 trainer. Mostl;y it was cost on this one. Back wehn I was there, if you had a 8086 chip, it was in a IBM PC.

  • For All You "Does it run Linux folks" (Score:3, Insightful)

    by jtshaw ( 398319 ) on Friday June 06, 2003 @10:31PM (#6136860) Homepage
    You can build your own CPU in and FPGA these days and run linux on it..... Though a big FPGA isn't exactly cheap.

    Anyway, most of us that went through college engineering programs did something similar to this at one time. Whether it was building a computer out of parts or designing and architecture in VHDL and throwing it with some assembly code on an FPGA. It is a good way to learn how architectures really work.
  • Well, I don't think anyone is going to be trying to top my sig for a while. Hard to do much better than: You had a microprocessor? I had to fab my CPU out of discrete components and develop my own microcode, assembly routines, and C compiler.
    • [Sounds like you had a C128... if not, what machine was that?]

      You used 128 mode and BASIC? Slacker... :-)

      I used 64 mode (most of my friends still had 64s, I really didn't have a use for the extra memory, and it ran faster) and wrote in machine language--not assembly... I didn't know that there was such a thing as an assembler at the time. I had an Apple II CPU manual that was reasonably close enough to the 64 to get the opcodes right, the memory map from the back of the 128 manual, and a hand-copied lis

  • Not bad... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by curtlewis ( 662976 ) on Friday June 06, 2003 @10:52PM (#6136950)
    But can I play Quake on it?

    Seriously, though, I like that he added the LCD status display. Most people would just use the video for display, but after having worked on boxes with those on board LCDs for status info, I've learned to love em.

    • In A.D. 2101
      War was beginning.
      (...scroll...)
      What happen ?
      (...scroll...)
      Somebody set up us the bomb
      (...scroll...)
      We get signal
      (...scroll...)
      What !
      (...scroll...)
      Main screen turn on
      (...scroll...)
      It's You !!
      (...scroll...)
      How are you gentlemen !!
      All your base are belong to us
      You are on the way to destruction
      (...scroll...)
      What you say !!
      (...scroll...)
      You have no chance to survive
      make your time
      HA HA HA HA ....
      (...scroll...)
      Take off every 'zig'
      You know what you doing
      Move 'zig'
      (...scroll...)
      For great justice

      I k

  • go camping. (Score:5, Funny)

    by malia8888 ( 646496 ) on Friday June 06, 2003 @11:00PM (#6136988)
    If this guy ever goes camping, which is doubtful given his penchant for the computer life; I would like to go along.

    I Imagine that before the s'mores are grilled (graham crackers, hershey bars & marshmallows) he will have a king sized bed made out of duck down, a T.V. made out of acorns, and an air conditioner made out of discarded spam cans.

    Wonder if he is single? I have a lovely niece.

    What am I saying? Of course he is single.

  • All I need is some soothing music, some candles, a woman, nine months, and I can build my own awesome "computer" that runs on a neural network, billions of neurons running simultaneously.

    Unfortunately this is Slashdot, so I have all the time in the world, but no woman ...

  • Violation (Score:4, Funny)

    by panxerox ( 575545 ) * on Friday June 06, 2003 @11:04PM (#6137008)
    A clear IP violation, I mean this was done in Job's garage first you know.

  • I did some of this on paper (Score:4, Interesting)

    by earthforce_1 ( 454968 ) <earthforce_1 AT yahoo DOT com> on Friday June 06, 2003 @11:05PM (#6137011) Journal
    Back in the 1970's when I was a teenager, and the 8080 was the newest thing on the block. But I hated the stupid instruction set. Around that time, Heathkit sold my (almost) dream computer, a PDP 11/03 clone with a paper tape reader, that would have cost me 15 years of work on my paper route. I eventually bought just the manuals, which was all that I could afford. Eventually I bought a cheaper 6800 based kit they sold, with a whopping 512 bytes of RAM, but that is another story.

    I had a lot of 7400 series TTL manuals handy however, and the reading the PDP manuals gave me a lot of hints as to what I wanted in my (then) dream CPU - a 16 bit instruction set, with lots of general purpose registers, lots of fancy addressing modes, a hardware multiplier/divider, and a much larger address space so I could run a real compiler - not that interpretive BASIC crap that was all the rage back then. (I kind of knew that even if I could bring my vision to life, writing a decent compiler would be even tougher than building the CPU, but one battle at a time....) I worked out the instruction set, and designed most of the ALU, although I got stuck on trying to make the divider work. I was also somewhat disappointed in that it appeared I wouldn't be able to get the damned thing to go any faster than about 12 MHz, the TTL wouldn't work any faster. I was also stuck on what to do for memory.

    I couldn't go much beyond a paper design, the parts would have cost me close to $1000, not including the UV eraser and the PROM programmers. But it was still educational. I dropped the project for good when I saw the first 68000 datasheet. Here was the CPU I had been trying to design for the past 3 or 4 years. It had an nice instruction set a lot like the PDP, plenty of registers, plenty of indexed addressing modes, and a hardware integer multiplier/divider. In 1984 I bought my first "real" computer, a 128K "thin" Mac, which sported a 6MHz 68000, and to this day, still resides in my parents closet!

    (The flyback xfmr burned out years ago, a common problem with the original macs)

  • Not too far out--really! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Hacker Cracker ( 204131 ) on Friday June 06, 2003 @11:18PM (#6137063)
    Not that long ago we had to build a functioning RISC computer from logic ICs at Cal Poly Pomona. And not as a part of an EE program either--it was a part of the CS curriculum!

    In all the time I spent there, that was one of the most interesting things I've ever done. Luckily for us, we didn't have to design and etch the boards, but we did have to come up with the microcode and burn it into EPROMs as well as solder a bunch of components and IC sockets onto said board. We also had to write an assembler for it as well and of course the whole thing had to work if you wanted to pass the course!

    It was only capable of handling 4 bits at a time and was manually clocked (keep flipping faster! I need those spreadsheet values by tomorrow!) but by God the thing actually worked. And you could actually understand how it worked.

    Even though you could conceivably expand the thing to 32 or 64 bits, I can't imagine why anyone would. Except of course if you're living in a post-apocalyptic (or post NGSCB) world where you can't walk into a store and buy one...

    -- Shamus

    This space for rent! EZ terms!

  • DIY adders (Score:3, Interesting)

    by vrmlguy ( 120854 ) <samwyse&gmail,com> on Saturday June 07, 2003 @12:05AM (#6137200) Homepage Journal
    I can't get to this guy's website, but reading other people's replies gives me a good idea of what it's all about.

    I've designed a few CPUs back when I was in college, using 74xx ALUs, etc. Never acutally implemented one, though a friend did. What I have done is buy a bunch of used relays and had my teen-age children build full adders with them. Now that's fun. You get a real sense of accomplishment when you flip some switches, listen to the relays click, and see a row of light bulbs display the sum.

  • Slashdotted (Score:3, Funny)

    by Peter Lake ( 260100 ) on Saturday June 07, 2003 @04:19AM (#6137862)
    Site's down. Here is the Babelfish translation of slashdot effect:

    Forbidden
    You don't have by mission ton of ACCESS/mycpu g.htm on this servers.

    No, I don't have a ton of access - not even by mission.

  • This are (could be?) the times... (Score:5, Informative)

    by kju ( 327 ) on Saturday June 07, 2003 @05:16AM (#6137953)
    DIY electronics seems to be dying and i can't really understand why. I recently made some research for a own project and i came to the conclusion that it nowadays it is easier to design some decent hardware than ever before.

    No more fiddling with a bunch of TTL/CMOS logic chips. You can get a programmable CPLD with 800 logic gates for 99 us cents (e.g. from xilinx). Free design software (also said to be running under linux with wine) is available too. 800 gates is enough for some really nice projects. In circuit programmable.

    Or try a cheap controller. For example AVR RISC. They are fast, they are powerful, they can be programmed with a gcc-variant. Just take the chips a oscillator and go. Programmable with a cheap parport interface. Oh, and the best is the price: Starting at US$2.

    Soldering it on a experimental board? Maybe, but what about designing a pcb? Take EAGLE as layout software (freeware version for non commercial use up to 1/2 eurocard, enough for some decent design). Get the pcb fabricated for example in hungary (US$21 for a whole eurocard, all inclusive).

    So i hope we will see a return of home development. It is getting even cheaper and more powerful. I just read an announcement for a new FPGA with 1 million (!) gates which target price is under US$20. This is enough to even construct your own CPU. Wouldn't that be fun and educative?

    So see the possibilities and go out and design something. And probably make the design available under some open license. The time has never been better before.

  • Slashdotted translation! (Score:4, Funny)

    by nunofgs ( 636910 ) on Saturday June 07, 2003 @08:23AM (#6138238)
    You don't have by mission ton of ACCESS/mycpu g.htm on this servers.

    which roughly translates to: all your base are belong to slashdot

  • Other FPGA CPU projects (Score:3, Informative)

    by nutznboltz ( 473437 ) on Saturday June 07, 2003 @10:42AM (#6138574) Homepage Journal
    http://www.fpgacpu.org/links.html [fpgacpu.org]

    http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/pdp_fpga.html [aracnet.com]

    Michael Sokolov is rumored to be working on a FPGA VAX-inspired CPU with intent to fab eventually.

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