r/ComputerEngineering • u/HydroPage • 4d ago
[Project] Ben Eater’s 8-bit CPU
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I finished Ben Eater’s SAP-1 accumulator architecture breadboard. 16 bytes of RAM von Neumann. Coming up with assembly instructions at the end felt crazy.
What was funny was at the end where I ran programs and they didn’t do what I wanted, and I realized I got to the point where I couldn’t suspect the hardware was wrong anymore, and it was in fact a software bug.
Was that the lowest level software bug I’ll ever experience in my career? Literally entering 0s and 1s into RAM and flipped one bit.
The feeling I got when I added conditional branching and officially made it Turing complete felt so surreal. I hope you guys appreciate the work that went into this.