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I made Ben Eater's 8-bit breadboard computer Emulator in C++

112 points| 0xhh | 4 years ago |github.com

11 comments

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hamandcheese|4 years ago

If you haven’t seen Ben Eater’s YouTube videos, they are top-notch. Even if you “know” the subject material (I thought I did...) they are very well done and worth watching.

globular-toast|4 years ago

Definitely. I made the real thing in hardware. As a complete beginner to electronics it took me quite a long time but it was so worth it. I've always hated having to accept the existence of "magic" in my machines. For me this was the final layer that allowed me to finally understand how electronic computers actually work. Things like building flip flops from scratch were so insightful. And if that's not enough he's got videos on how transistors work at the atomic level. It's like the whole of computer science finally fell into place.

JazzXP|4 years ago

I was thinking about doing this myself (but in Javascript, coz that's what I'm using day to day at the moment), and literally implementing each module of the board as a seperate piece of code.

bhhaskin|4 years ago

This is a neat little project. Thanks for sharing!

jgwil2|4 years ago

Should be marked "Show HN," no?

dangrie158|4 years ago

Nice, I built a version in python with curses visualization of all states. It emulates all chips ob the hardware level (chips.py) and does not need any dependencies except py3.7: https://github.com/dangrie158/SAP-1/tree/master/Emulator

scaramanga|4 years ago

Cool!

I didn't go as far as implementing the CPU, but watching his vids inspired me to write a circuit emulator, also in python:

https://github.com/giannitedesco/primula

I used it to emulate all the various flip flops, but I was thinking of building a computer in it.

lodovic|4 years ago

That looks really nice, how is the speed? I did the same in C#, and implemented it up to bus and transistor level. I could execute a Fibionacci program in asm but it was horribly slow (less than 1M instructions/sec)

klelatti|4 years ago

Thanks. This looks like an amazing (teaching / exploratory) resource.

Just one question - couldn't immediately see a license file?