After submitting stories to Slashdot for gawd knows how long, I've finally had one accepted! It's not up yet, but I'll link to it when it is. Great news!

It relates to my below post on building a computer. I might be a techie, but I'm not really confident with how memory addressing works at the component level. Address buses, address managers, logic circuits, etc etc.. I'm a computer guy, not an electronics engineer. Hopefully the readers of Slashdot will be able to help me through my Ask Slashdot question.

Keep your eyes peeled.

Check out these pictures of inside my computer. Get ready to puke.

computer1.jpg
computer2.jpg

I've just noticed the numbers running alongside the journal entries. They're not sequential, so I'm assuming they're a global 'journal entry' number. But if that's true, how comes they hardly go up? For two posts that are 12 hours apart, the number went up by 7. Does this mean only 7 other people posted to their journal in this time? If so, that's kinda crap ;-) Doesn't anyone use these things?

For those of you who don't know me too well, I have a weblog. Peter Cooper's weblog

The story of how a guy hacked a ISA IO card to use 300h instead of 378h. Very very cool.

Whenever someone says 'I'm going to build my own computer', you imagine homebrew kit and someone actually putting together their own PC.

Well, I usually put my own computers together, but I mean something different this time.

I'm actually going to build my OWN computer. Not a PC. I'm going to design it from the ground up (almost.. I'll use an existing CPU!). I've been sniffing around for some 8086 chips, which are ultra cheap now. Even Pentium chips are cheap now. You can buy 100 of them for $15 on eBay sometimes. Great opportunity to play and mess them up ;-)

I want to keep to a slow speed though. I'll probably run an 8086 at the regular 4.77Mhz, get it all hooked up and working, hook up memory, and an EEPROM.. and write a BASIC interpreter or something. I wanted to write a Perl interpreter, but heck.. Perl is the WORST language you could have on a small scale system(!!) Memory hog ahoy. BASIC just seems a bit obvious though.

I'll see when I get to that stage.. I might start on that bit early and use BOCHS to test. Not sure if BOCHS can emulate from memory though.. it might need a disk image. I don't want to get into all that, so perhaps I'll be looking for another 808x emulator.

Any suggestions or advice? I really need it. This should be a fun project though.

I've been a Slashdot 'member' for a few years now, but have only been contributing for the past year.

I've seen a few of these journals about, and wondered how to make one of my own. I looked around my settings area, but couldn't work it out. Then one day I saw it. And they call me observant!

I figure I'll post some stuff here.. although I don't know if anyone will be reading it. If you are, do let me know!