BYTEC has a new home

BYTEC has a new home
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

Multiplication & Division
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

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 ...

CPU assembly completed

CPU assembly completed
This is what an assembled stack of seven CPU boards looks like. I was able to complete the soldering work recently, and now have a complete CPU and a bunch of peripherals on printed circuit boards. Farewell, old wire-wrapped CPU prototype! The new CPU is way more robust than the delicate wire mesh. It is ...

Got CPU boards

Got CPU boards
Time to break out the soldering iron again! CPU boards arrived in mail a few days back. That’s seven euro-sized boards, each one individually sealed in plastic, with green solder mask (anything else would mean extra manufacturing cost) and without silk screen layer (again, just to save a few bucks). At current prices of PCB ...