CPU Devlog 1

Migration & Goals

This was a migration from macondo to stardance, the journals from the past can be seen on the github page. My goal with this project is to first design in the online, then transfer it to a PCB, then maybe if I have time make a programming language to code my own CPU.
Currently, I’m only simulating it through digital logic sim

Source

Surprisingly the mattbatwings redstone computer playlist (minecraft) is super helpful and is kinda guiding me on what to do. Ofc there are differences from minecraft to logic gates, but I’ve been able to adapt accordingly

What I’ve Done

I’ve made the register files, ALU, program counter, and control rom

This session

First I copy pasted everything from macondo to a journal.md file so that I can have my hours here too.
Next, I brainstormed on how to fix the problem of the clock incrementing multiple times per tick, but as I was fixing it I realized that it wasn’t a problem at all. With some more tinkering, I realized that there was a “race” between clocking the components and the program counter, which I fixed by making an inverted timer which would clock the components right after the program counter incremented.
Afterwards, I realized everything was super messy and it was hard to figure out what wires went where, so I just restarted and put everything back together again.
After that, I implemented jumping (with thankfully no problems at all which is awesome) and made some edits to my really basic compiler (comments and more commands)
Finally, I started on branching, but it doesn’t work because of mystery reasons. My next goal is to fix that part.