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BMOW

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Soldato
Joined
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You may or may not have heard of this. Big Mess Of Wires is a fully functional 8 bit CPU that was made by hand, manually wrapping each wire around the pins. Quite amazing really, when you consider how much planning and man hours must have gone into this.

BMOW.png


Official Website:
http://www.stevechamberlin.com/cpu/about/

Sound demo:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdTH4KGBaBk&feature=player_embedded

Specs:
  • Current clock speed is 2MHz. It could theoretically go to about 3MHz (untested).
  • 512 KBytes of RAM, 512 KBytes of ROM.
  • Power draw is 10 Watts, 2.0A at 5V.
  • VGA video output is 512×480 with two colors, or 128×240 with 256 colors.
  • Audio and music is provided by a three-voice programmable sound generator.
  • Keyboard input is a standard PC keyboard with PS/2 connector.
  • Debug display is a 24×2 character text LCD.
  • There are roughly 1250 wires connecting the components, so 2500 individual hand-turned wire wraps.

I would definitely think about doing something like this. Just for the hell of it. I wonder if you could alter GEOS to run on it... anyway, discuss.
 
Last edited:
samir_ansari said:
that really is amazing, i wonder how long that took - and how would gta IV run on that beast, I bet it would fly.
Click to expand...

I don't think there are many programs in use today that would run on that seen as it is an 8 bit system! Getting windows in a form that you recognise on it would be a challenge, let alone the clock speeds.

As a project this is truely awesome though, must have taken forever to build, let alone sourcing of parts etc!
 
Surely you could have some sort of custom PCB made, get six or so different ones that you need all with the holes in exactly the same place for the components themselves to go on. With the right blueprint i expect you could make a modern day CPU that way...
 
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