Daily Archives: 6/17/2011

The Duo Adept, another 8 bit computer built from TTL logic…

In a previous blog post about a year ago, I pointed you at Jack Eisenmann’s 4 bit computer built from TTL chips. It was cool, made entirely on breadboards tucked away inside a big plastic container. Or, I used to think it was cool, until I saw what he’s been up to: an 8 bit computer, complete with video interface. All done on an ungodly number of breadboards. It takes a certain kind of obsessive lunacy to make one of these, and I can appreciate it.



His web page detailing the Duo Adept..

Bit banger

Anyone who has seen my projects on the Atari 2600 might reasonably conclude that I have a thing for retro computing. The saying goes “it is no virtue to do with more, what can be done with less” and I can’t think of someone whose projects have embodied that more than demo coder Linus Akesson (lft). His latest demo runs on the tiniest of tiny Atmel processors, the ATTINY15. It has just 32 bytes of memory (just the registers, really) and room for 512 instructions. Yet, lft made a cool demo that runs on it, generating both video and sound. Oh, and he’s only running it at 1.6 Mhz (yes, 1.6 Megahertz). Very cool!


More details about Bit banger, and how he did it..