PedroDiogo_'s comments

I'm not sure it that's the focus of the project.

If this is his final EE project as said on the page, in my opinion the main focus of the project is to have a working proof of concept of an implementation of a X86 processor on a FPGA.

He wouldn't have the time to build a fully ready to market X86 processor all by himself, I think.

I have one extra ATMega168 and I will test some of these methods but I'm not sure if you can kill one of these chips just by doing some of these methods.

All I can say is that once, while programming one of these ATMegas, I accidentally swapped VDD and GND and left it there for 2/3 minutes. The chip got very hot and I burnt my finger but once I left the chip cool I was able to program it again and after 2 years it is still working.

Great little game! I never imagined a game would be so effective to get you to learn hjkl, but makes sense, most people learn wasd by playing games too.

I'm using a Macbook Air with Mac OS X Lion and Google Chrome and the gameplay is very smooth.

I'm having a hard time believing this.

Such devices would need to return land on a regular basis even if helped by solar panels. The costs of maintaining a significant number of this nodes floating would be considerable.

Also the delay on the communications would also be significant compared to a normal server. If you take the low computational power of a Raspberry Pi and put it with a 100Mbps radio (effective data rate would be less), the result would be a very slow website.

I like your idea, I wish I had it first.

Best of luck for you :)

Something like PWM?

I bet Macs don't generate analog voltages to fade the LED, it would be expensive.

It seems to me that he actually coded in Assembly and then translated to 1s and 0s, and that's quite normal.

I've done it for school projects, where we had a simple processor that had to be "programmed" this way. Sure I didn't have to implement a BASIC interpreter, but I know how hard it is to debug.

This semester I had a course where we had to implement a MIPS based processor from the ground up, with pipeline, caches, forwarding, and other techniques. I recommend starting with a basic non-pipelined MIPS processor, as it is not hard to find information, and go from there.

We had to use VHDL, and also used some predefined ports, so we hadn't to create everything from nand gates like you are trying to do. The book we used was "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach" by Hennessy & Patterson.

How is this HN front page worthy?