A DIY mad scientist from Poland constructed his personal CPU out of dozens of historic reminiscence chips
You could be studying this on a gaming PC you constructed your self, however you in all probability cannot say you constructed the processor from scratch with your individual fingers and a soldering iron. One DIY fanatic did simply that in a venture that is a formidable take a look at how computer systems work, and the way far they’ve come.
First reported by Tom’s {Hardware}, Polish computing YouTuber Majsterkowanie i nie tylko (MINT for brief) posted a video on his channel earlier this month displaying off a working selfmade CPU constructed with retro components impressed by 8-bit microprocessors from the early days of PCs. MINT even particularly mentions the Zilog Z80, which was one of the fashionable processors of the late Seventies and even turned an early laptop computer chip within the Eighties.
The entire venture took 3 months to finish and stemmed from MINT’s curiosity in retro computer systems. As he explains within the video, which has been translated from Polish with assistance from AI: “It began with gathering a considerable amount of outdated reminiscence chips. I began experimenting with them and rapidly realized you may make some actually cool issues out of those seemingly ineffective actually outdated issues.”
Initially, MINT was simply utilizing these outdated reminiscence chips for easy duties, like controlling a motor or gentle dimmer. However finally he found out that by combining a number of reminiscence chips, he may be capable to make a fully-functioning 8-bit CPU.
Over the course of the half-hour lengthy video, MINT lays out the prolonged course of that went into conducting this. Not solely did he construct and solder the CPU himself, he even spent “lots of of hours” writing the code for it. In case you’re within the finer particulars of how computer systems work, MINT’s video is an attention-grabbing deep dive into all of the parts and the way they work together with one another to execute instructions.
The top result’s the “EPROMINT CPU.” As a proof of idea, MINT hooked it as much as a small VFD show and programmed it to play scenes from The Matrix. They clearly come by way of pixelated, but it surely works nonetheless.
As MINT put it: “It does not require a workforce of individuals or a multi-million greenback price range to construct, but it is a totally useful processor, and easy sufficient I can clarify the way it works.”