I made Ben Eater's 8-bit breadboard computer Emulator in C++ (opens in new tab)

(github.com)

112 points0xhh4y ago11 comments

11 comments

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-toast4y 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.

ryeguy_244y ago

100% ditto minus the building it myself. Through ben's videos I finally understood how instructions really work and how a program is executed. Despite being a tech fanatic, I'm have so much more appreciation now for what is actually happening.

JazzXP4y 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.

bhhaskin4y ago

This is a neat little project. Thanks for sharing!

jgwil24y ago

Should be marked "Show HN," no?

dangrie1584y 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

scaramanga4y 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.

lodovic4y 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)

sokoloff4y ago

Worth noting that the Apple ][ and C64 had a 1.023MHz clock rate with a minimum of 2 cycles per instruction, so your “horribly slow” system might be about real-time for the era.

(Atari 800 had a 1.77 or 1.79MHz clock, but wasn’t regarded as wildly different.)

klelatti4y ago

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

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

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