[MalphasWats]

It's incredible how influential Ben Eater's breadboard computer series has been in hobby electronics. I've been similarly inspired to try to design my own "retro" CPU.

I desperately want something as easy to plug into things as the 6502, but with jussst a little more capability - few more registers, hardware division, that sort of thing. It's a really daunting task.

I always end up coming back to just use an MCU and be done with it, and then I hit the How To Generate Graphics problem.

[PfhorSlayer]

Funny enough, that's exactly where this project started. After I built his 8 bit breadboard computer, I started looking into what might be involved in making something a bit more interesting. Can't do a whole lot of high-speed anything with discrete logic gates, so I figured learning what I could do with an FPGA would be far more interesting.

[bArray]

Registers can be worked around by using the stack and/or memory. Division could always be implemented as a simple function. It's part of the fun of working at that level.

Regarding graphics, initially output serial. Abstract the problem away until you are ready to deal with it. If you sneak up on an Arduino and make it scream, you can make it into a very basic VGA graphics card [1]. Even easier is ESP32 to VGA (also gives keyboard and mouse) [2].

[1] https://www.instructables.com/Arduino-Basic-PC-With-VGA-Outp...

[2] https://www.aliexpress.us/item/1005006222846299.html

[MenhirMike]

I was about to recommend the Parallax Propeller (the first one that's available in DIP format), but arguably, that one is way more complex to program for (and also significantly more powerful, and at that point you might as well look into an ESP32 and that is "just use an MCU" :))

And yeah, video output is a significant issue because of the required bandwidth for digital outputs (unless you're okay with composite or VGA outputs, I guess they can still be done with readily available chips?). The recent Commander X16 settled for an FPGA for this.

[MalphasWats]

I feel like the CX16 lost its way about a week after the project started and it suddenly became an expensive FPGA-based blob. But at the same time, I'm not sure what other option there is for a project like that.

I always got the impression that David sort of got railroaded by the other members of the team that wanted to keep adding features and MOAR POWAH, and didn't have a huge amount of choice because those features quickly scoped out of his own areas of knowledge.

[verticalscaler]

True, can't think of much else this popular.

He started posting videos again recently with some regularity after a lull. Audience is in the low hundreds of thousands. I assume fewer than 100k actually finish videos and fewer still do anything with it.

Hobby electronics seems surprisingly small in this era.

[TillE]

Even if you're not much of a tinkerer, Ben Eater's videos are massively helpful if you want to truly understand how computers work. As long as you come in knowing the rudiments of digital electronics, just watching his stuff is a whole education in 8-bit computer design. You won't quite learn how modern computers work with their fancy caches and pipelines and such, but it's a really strong foundation to build on.

I've built stuff with microcontrollers (partially aided by techniques learned here), but that was very purpose-driven and I'm not super interested in just messing around for fun.

[hedora]

I wonder if there’s much overlap between people that watch YouTube to get deep technical content (instead of reading), and people that care about hobby electronics.

I’m having trouble wrapping my head around how / why you’d use youtube to present analog electrical engineering formulas and pin out diagrams instead of using latex or a diagram.

[jsheard]

I've been looking into graphics on MCUs and was disappointed to learn that the little "NeoChrom" GPU they're putting on newer STM32 parts is completely undocumented. Historically they have been good about not putting black boxes in their chips, but I guess it's probably an IP block they've licensed from a third party.

[gchadwick]

The RP2040 is a great MCU for playing with graphics as it can bit bang VGA and DVI/HDMI. There's some info on the DVI here: https://github.com/Wren6991/PicoDVI

I wrote a couple of articles on how to do bit banged VGA on the RP2040 from scratch: https://gregchadwick.co.uk/blog/playing-with-the-pico-pt5/ and https://gregchadwick.co.uk/blog/playing-with-the-pico-pt6/ plus an intro to PIO https://gregchadwick.co.uk/blog/playing-with-the-pico-pt4/

[MrBuddyCasino]

That sucks. There are other MCUs with 2D graphics peripherals, eg the NXP i.MX line.

[unwind]

Agreed. It is so, so, so very disappointing. I was deeply surprised (in a non-pleasant way) when I first opened up a Reference Manual for one of those chips and saw that the GPU chapter was, like, four pages. :(