Developer Creates DIY 8-Bit CPU

MaizeMan writes "Not for the easily distracted: a Belmont software developer's hand-built CPU was featured in Wired recently. Starting with a $50 wire wrap board, Steve Chamberlin built his CPU with 1253 pieces of wire, each wire wrapped by hand at both ends. Chamberlin salvaged parts from '70s and '80s era computers, and the final result is an 8-bit processor with keyboard input, a USB connection, and VGA graphical output. More details are available on the developer's blog."

Comments

Re:But does it run Vista?

[Vanders]

According to the fine article it has a 24bit address bus and an 8bit data bus, but presents everything via. a 16bit ISA. It's a bit like a 8088.

Of course the ISA is probably nothing like an x86, so it still wouldn't run [MS|PC|DR|Free]-DOS anyway. Apparently it does have a C compiler, so perhaps you could port Bochs or Qemu to it and then run DOS on that. Emulated. On a TTL CPU running at 2Mhz (2Mhz slower than the original IBM PC). Maybe not then.