wackybrit's Journal: Building my own computer

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.