Have you ever wanted to build your own computer?  And by build your own, I mean from scratch... literally wiring logic gates and registers together.  Its really fun actually, I just finished a project for school where I had to not only build my own instruction set architecture, but then use that machine language that I created to write an assembly program for conway's game of life and then run it in the simulator.

Its really rewarding.  I remember when I first learned to program BASIC on the calculator and it felt cool I could actually program the thing.  And then I learned assembly and I though it was cooler that I was actually writing the lowest level of machine programming.  But then we had to use Logisim and now its even cooler to actually wire everything together to create your own instruction set!

Logisim

Its relatively easy to use and its in java so it will run on any platform.  I dare someone to try to make a z80 CPU!  Its actually much harder than the architecture I created since mine had a single sized, single clock cycle instruction set for simplicity, similar to ARM.

Have you ever wanted to build your own computer?  And by build your own, I mean from scratch... literally wiring logic gates and registers together.  Its really fun actually, I just finished a project for school where I had to not only build my own instruction set architecture, but then use that machine language that I created to write an assembly program for conway's game of life and then run it in the simulator.

Its really rewarding.  I remember when I first learned to program BASIC on the calculator and it felt cool I could actually program the thing.  And then I learned assembly and I though it was cooler that I was actually writing the lowest level of machine programming.  But then we had to use Logisim and now its even cooler to actually wire everything together to create your own instruction set!

Logisim

Its relatively easy to use and its in java so it will run on any platform.  I dare someone to try to make a z80 CPU!  Its actually much harder than the architecture I created since mine had a single sized, single clock cycle instruction set for simplicity, similar to ARM.

I don't see any fun on that, but that's just me.

I tend to hate hardware and processors, graphic cards, LCD's are a bunch of words that I don't like to use. I prefer programming and software

Nice find quigibo.  I might try it out! It looks like you can make circuitry for it. I wonder if it has some built-in processors, too.

Personally I'M more a designing person than hardware, and I'm a bit on the programming side too. I guess it depends of people. I personally am not good with my hands. This software seems pretty interesting, although I would probably not get most of it.

This sounds really cool.  What class was this for, Quigibo?

Its relatively easy to use and its in java so it will run on any platform.  I dare someone to try to make a z80 CPU!  Its actually much harder than the architecture I created since mine had a single sized, single clock cycle instruction set for simplicity, similar to ARM.

Here's a partial circuit diagram for the z80



Good luck drawing that 

Darn that must be tricky to learn for someone who never did hardware or low level stuff. X.x

This is amazingly fun!  I've been building since i've had no internet for a while, but i have created a sort of z80-ish cpu!  It by no means has the same commands as the z80, but the syntax is inspired greatly by it.  It has 4 registers, A B C and D, 256 bytes of program ROM, and 256 bytes of general RAM for manipulation.  It can do things like load numbers to and from register and RAM, it can do math such as adding and multiplication in register, and it has some program control like jumps, conditional jumps, and the infamous Decrement B jump if not Zero command ^^ Which i am very proud of.   It also has zero and carry flags, inspired by z80 again

Here is a zip with the full command set and file, it also has a small 5 byte program included.