BYTEC/16

Rev. 2.0 boards and what’s next 4

Dec

18

2016

This is how a box full of printed circuit boards looks like. That’s 30 boards total – memory card and 5 CPU cards, each in 5 copies nicely sealed in plastic. They have been sitting in my drawer since last Summer. In the meantime I have undergone a little surgery, moved to a new house, ...

Schematics and board layouts of BYTEC/16 rev. 2.0 4

Apr

15

2016

I have finished schematics and board layouts for BYTEC/16 rev. 2.0, including the addition of a new MMU board. BYTEC/16 occupies now of 8 boards (previously 7) with MMU being the second from the bottom of the stack. Boards #0 through #4 have been modified and need to be sent to a fab house, while ...

BYTEC/16 rev 2.0 gets MMU 1

Feb

19

2016

BYTEC is undergoing a hardware revision and will soon receive a set of new features. Recently, while fiddling with monitor/OS and thinking what it would take to implement memory management in Minix, I realized that BYTEC’s memory system is way too simplistic and would lead to serious limitations. So, BYTEC/16 rev 2.0 is on its ...

BYTEC has a new home

Jul

20

2015

BYTEC/16 finally has a professionally looking rack enclosure. It is the same enclosure which I bought on eBay and described in this post almost 5 years ago. Yes, five years ago, when my homebrew computer was mostly designed but still only half built. Now it has a new home, seems to be much happier, and ...

Multiplication & Division

Jul

5

2015

BYTEC’s hardware does not support integer multiplication and division. It was a design choice I made very early in the project in order to keep the hardware simple. Fortunately, both multiplication and division can be implemented in software using simple arithmetic (addition/subtraction and bit shifting). Until now I never got around to implementing it, but ...

Works like a charm 8

May

8

2015

As announced last time, I powered up the CPU. In all honesty, I was expecting to see a blank screen and was prepared to spend some quality debugging time in front of a scope and logic analyzer, but was positively surprised to see that the CPU worked on the very first attempt. I even let ...

BYTEC/16

Rev. 2.0 boards and what’s next 4

Schematics and board layouts of BYTEC/16 rev. 2.0 4

BYTEC/16 rev 2.0 gets MMU 1

BYTEC has a new home

Multiplication & Division

Works like a charm 8

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