FPGA based CPU designs from the 90s, PART II

This series of videos show some of my own CPU designs based on FPGAs from the 1990s. If you like old PCs and wire wrapping, this video is for you. In this second video, I'll show some of the software tools available at that time and check out the board for functionality.

[@movax20h]

Using FPGA to defeat the FPGA software protection. By the same company. Genius.

[@raven4k998]

yeah well, they didn't see that one coming did they now?

[@AliMirjamali]

I am very happy that you have saved these precious custom boards, software, data and the PC. It is very nice that they still work. Thank you very much for taking the time to record & share this video. Hope you keep them all together.

[@joesmith-je3tq]

Glad you enjoyed the little Joe Smith history. I'm a bit of a pack rat and computer buff so I doubt I will toss them out any time soon.

[@theLuigiFan0007Productions]

Those custom boards truly are amazing. I too would consider them precious items to keep around, they're a little piece of computer history, and probably of sentimental value as well. Absolutely love seeing things like this, it's so cool. You seem to understand all of this like it's so simple, but I know that it's the result of many years of experience. I can handle languages like Python, but assembly and FPGA programming is a mystery to me. The only assembly like thing I'v ever done is set timer/clock registers on a Arduino to get a custom PWM frequency. I have always wanted to design a CPU, maybe someday when I have more time (and money), I'll experiment with this kind of thing.

[@prozac1127]

Its now kept forever on youtube.

[@ferrari2k]

@@joesmith-je3tq And hopefully you have backups pf everything, it would be too bad if anything of this gets lost due to a faulty harddrive :(

[@SODA-iz8lc]

Hi Joe, Gee i'm speechless. The wire wrapping was the best part for me. I can see you know what you're doing. You said, this is just for fun, well what ever. Ha, great stuff.Thanks for the upload

[@joesmith-je3tq]

Thanks. Yea, I enjoy playing with electronics as a hobby. This was just a little learning exorcise for the fun of it.

[@HampusSandberg]

Thanks for sharing! Gives engineers like me, working with modern FPGAs and tools, some perspective and appreciation for what we have nowadays.

[@raven4k998]

who rules ThunderDome? MasterBlaster!!🤣

[@greenfoam]

I'm so impressed you not only learnt all this but that you remember how it all works. You are truly Gifted

[@billthekid1982]

Oh man, someone with your skills can do wonderful things with new era microcontrollers. All your videos are awesome I'm enjoying them from the first second until the end!!

[@joesmith-je3tq]

+Βασίλης Thanks.

[@a753951852]

Thank you for this video.. The hardware and software you showed took me down the memory lane when my dad and I made our first home pc, with old external dial up modem and windows 95.. The coolest thing we did was to connect the TV coaxial cable into the computer.. I was on the top of the world when it worked!.. Thank you for this video once again!.. 😊

[@cmdrdr.digital865]

Yes I did enjoy it. Have never seen this kind of hardware/software demonstrated before. Thanks.

[@hubzcaps]

man what a design. epic testing also. that's very fast. that wire wrap is amazeing

[@zorsenothorse]

still works after all the years, great craftmanship :)

[@doantrungnghia05]

Thank you very much for taking us through this magnificent tour, that i think is also a history lesson as well.

[@joesmith-je3tq]

No problem. Glad you enjoyed them.

[@truemorpheus]

I am totally impressed by your work!

[@joesmith-je3tq]

Thanks. Glad you enjoyed the video.

[@matheoml]

I am speechless. This is awesome to see.

[@ANIXElectronics]

And now my brain hurts. Those thing you have done are absolutely awesome.

[@jstro-hobbytech]

Awesome video man wow

[@gentlemanhk]

How did I not discover this channel before?!

[@joesmith-je3tq]

It is not monetized so YT algorithms do not promote it.

[@LaenPvP]

Thank you for sharing this video. You're an inspiration.

[@syproful]

You are the king. Very few show theire skills like you have. Very intresting to see.

[@joesmith-je3tq]

Thanks. Glad you enjoyed watching the videos. To be honest, I am surprised to see some of these projects I made along with the PCs still run.

[@JonWhitton]

Thanks for sharing, some nice old school tech

[@cdoublejj]

This is some pretty cool stuff

[@levv3477]

Good stuff Joe!

[@AZOffRoadster]

And I thought I was a packrat. I salute you, sir. I was surprised to see a lot of items I still have around.

[@slrucom]

Thanks for the video! That is incredible!

[@joesmith-je3tq]

Glad you enjoyed it. Most people seem to only make it though part I.

[@mightwilder]

WOW! this hardware is capable of attract attention!

[@theengineer9910]

Im dyin to get into the fpga design industry, this was art u are a genius

[@brucetungsten5714]

Just awesome!

[@shomonercy]

Man, I'd really love to see more of your FPGA board design and how stuff is connected up.

[@joesmith-je3tq]

That's a pretty old design. A couple of chips now or just a basic eval board would do much more than this thing could.

[@shomonercy]

That's what makes it so appealing I guess, everything is on one chip these days. Mixed-signal ICs by Silego, power supply chips by Enpirion/Altera, etc. It's cool we can program dev boards via USB and don't need to provide an external clock to small microcontrollers but if feels it's almost too easy.

[@ruhnet]

Unbelievable. Thanks for sharing. 😁

[@spayseghost]

Mr Joe Smith (sounds like a name the doctor would use)is one of the baddest asses who i have ever been able to observe(even if it is pre-recorded) as a tinkerer and a programmer, (mostly self-taught but, pursuing an engineering degree) I bow to you sir. you have inspired me .. thank you

[@lawrencemanning]

This is similar to how the 68040 was prototyped: many, many, ganged together FPGAs. Totally cool. I've used the Flex 10K (those are Flex 8Ks you have here I think) in some if my projects, glue and peripherals for 6809 and 68000 computers. The last of the 5V parts. Amazing video!

[@joesmith-je3tq]

Do you think that because the decoder logic on this board was placed into an 8K device or because the earlier wire wrapped boards I showed were based on the 8K, that this board would also use 8K devices to hold the main logic? At 4:14, my diagnostics show 10K100. At 12:41, my Labview interface is clearly marked 10K100. Do you think I marked both of them incorrectly? Maybe you are looking at the fact it's a wire wrap board wasn't aware that adapters were available for pretty much any package to PGAs. Maybe you just can't believe that a hobbyist would fork out this level of cash for the fun of it.

[@jimlkosmo5730]

Amazed.

[@shaunrossi9388]

This is 1000% more fascinating then most Arduino projects - nice work

[@theLuigiFan0007Productions]

Indeed lol. Though for what it's worth I really want to learn AVR Assembly.

[@shaunrossi9388]

Go for it - I learnt assembly for PICs back in 1999 - it taught me a lot on how the computer works. Quickly moved back to C to get this done as ASM would hurt my brain - not doing it routinely, plus, I'm lazy.

[@theLuigiFan0007Productions]

Definitely will. The main reason why is that I'd really like to be able to write more efficient programs. The Arduino IDE has doesn't exactly make it very clear what the code is doing sometimes. On one of my projects I had to set some bits in the registers with the _BV macro to alter the timer dividers (OCR1A to be specific), and I had to look up a datasheet for the Atemga328P to figure out what values I needed. That was the point I decided learning AVR Assembly might be a good idea, so I understand the hardware better.

[@Machin396]

Go for Assembler, at least for educational purpouses. I learned the basics of PIC assembler with a 16F873A, and then picked up Z80 assembler. It is the lowest level you can program before using hexadecimal. It gave me a grasp of how things were working under the hood. I don't program in Assembler for production, just for learning though.

[@theLuigiFan0007Productions]

I haven't started learning any assembly yet, to be honest. As of right now I'm still taking some classes for other things such as server management and powershell scripting. The summer is when I have the most time for projects and that's when I plan to follow some guides, experiment and begin learning and make use of assembly. For a couple of my projects in specific I will need code that is extremely optimized and very tightly timed, and assembly is very good for that kind of thing. Minimizing the amount of total instructions and all. Don't think I'l ever bother to write raw machine code in hex though lol. That's a whole other world of complicated.

[@leisergeist]

Very interesting! Really makes me appreciate what we have today for hardware development, even though I've only messed a little with FPGAs It's a shame wire wrapping isn't used much anymore, I really need to try it some time - maybe a lil wire wrapped Z80 computer...

[@joesmith-je3tq]

I can't say I would recommend it. I did recently WW a small computer for the fun of it. Even tossed in a 22V10. This computer controls the new transient generator that I designed to test the multi-meters.

[@AmstradExin]

Wow, this is the first time I actually saw how microcode actually looks like behind each CPU opcode.

[@RyanJardina]

Im going to start calling you "Cool Uncle Joe".

[@LaurentLaborde]

yes, we enjoyed it :)

[@infinteuniverse]

Oh my god. I haven't seen that energy star login screen since I was probably 10 years old when I used to play my cd games on my windows 98.

[@meteor8076]

Cool !

[@rolandmetivier4437]

I just do my things with an Arty Z7-20 though your stuff is cool. I could've used SDSoC but I chose to take the SystemVerilog route for my GPU/PPU journey, I don't like to have high-level synthesis stuff in my way (I may make my own RTL solver in C though). We're alike in that we each prefer our own tools.

[@carlosarturosalazarhernand4854]

master...Master Joe

[@38911bytefree]

GORGEOUS AND SPECHLESS AT THE SAME TIME. Now Im depresed but Ill raise my spirit turning a led with an Arduino LOL. Serioulsy, I have electronics as hobby (at a much lower ... LOWER level) but this is AIMING HIGH for sure. MY respect. Also, nice PC setup, love this full tower builts full of boards and the dual 200Mhz ceramics P1. Those where the old days. I worked long hours trying to learn bash and shell scripting in a similar full tower PC with a P133Mhz. For this task was like a fighter jet. Also doing my duties for Pascal and RHIDE on the GLORIOUS IBM PS/2 with the (not-even-famous) M type keyboard that filled with clicks all the room. People didnt like the IBM (it was too old by 2000). I loved it, no BS, PC-DOS and that ready to work. Long hours, never a problems. Good IBM.

[@ddostesting]

Did you do this for yourself, or for a school project? It's impressive!

[@joesmith-je3tq]

Just for fun.

[@Kirkbdavis]

Good stuff. You might want to consider putting the designs on open cores.

[@joesmith-je3tq]

Thanks. I'm glad you enjoyed it.

[@Ma_X64]

Wow!

[@Nyarmith]

you're a genius, dude

[@murrayedington]

I recall using Altera FPGAs back around 2000 (or were they CPLDs?). IIRC, we used Code Composer Studio and possibly Leonardo(?). Did most of the work in VHDL. Woo, takes me back. That wasn't really my forte at all. You obviously had a much better idea what you were doing!

[@joesmith-je3tq]

I used the free version of Leonardo Spectrum that came with Altera.

[@hsu4631]

wow I see the LabVIEW

[@dionbridger5944]

Holy smokes.

[@darrenanderson4550]

Very well done, I'm impressed. It's difficult enough to design an FPGA board nowadays on a PCB let alone wire wrapping it. Designing a CPU in HDL is no easy task either, I'm reading a few books on the subject at the minute. Are you still doing hardware designs?

[@joesmith-je3tq]

+Darren Anderson Thanks. Yes, I still like to play with the hardware now and then.

[@williamgoitia6735]

Mr. Smith I would like to learn from you I have an asic fpga based device that I wish to convert it into a computer, real hand computer that I can add keyboard, video output and so on. I want to know if it's possible. Thanks!

[@joesmith-je3tq]

An ASIC is not an FPGA. You could buy an IC today that would far exceed the parts I used and use free tools. If it is possible or not depends more on YOU than anything else. Education level, background, experience, maturity.

[@Veso266]

What editor are you using to highlight c, asm sytax, i guess notepad++ didnt exists back then

[@Hublium]

It's a commercial editor program called *MultiEdit*

[@Veso266]

@@Hublium thanks, do you have Win2000 version somewhere? As I could't find it online

[@Hublium]

@@Veso266 no idea, sorry

[@computeraidedworld1148]

Where can I learn to do this kinda stuff now-a-days? I'm in high school and I feel like I missed out on the experience of experimenting on computers. Now it's just like legos, don't even need to think.

[@joesmith-je3tq]

Clubs, books, college, university. While you perceive things today are like Legos, it's not once you start to move into the area of design.

[@Sebastianrogersmusic]

can you design a ASIC chip for mining litecoin or bitcoin?

[@joesmith-je3tq]

I don't spend too much time reading about that stuff but assume when it comes to money, people have dumped huge amounts of resources into it. While one person may come up with something, I doubt very much they would come close to competing with what has been invested.

[@daniloviana8818]

do you remember how many days did you spent back then you were doing this project?

[@joesmith-je3tq]

Hard to say as it was built off of prior projects I had made.

[@_a_x_s_]

Why is part 2 in 2016 and part 1 in 2017? Very amazing with only the asm binary coding without any HDL. At least it is not confined by some specified compiler... And I can only use VHDL... How long have you been learning all of this?

[@joesmith-je3tq]

I can only assume you misread the dates. You must have skipped the part about HDL.

[@_a_x_s_]

Emm.. I see the HDL part... But found hard to tell what the language is. Seems like ABEL but is not... I found I need to learn massively more...

[@wskinnyodden]

I have an idea that requires your expertise with FPGAs. Have you ever considered developing a full computer architecture exclusively around FPGAs? I have the idea pretty well thought out taking advantage of a known good architecture with a lot of pre-existing software that would enable once a mainboard is implemented to have the system running and then develop directly on top of it. My dream goal is to once we have that running on the old software to extend the system to enable a "morphing" computing solution where the system dynamically changes its internals depending on the task at hand (or in an AI case "learns by tweaking the hardware functionality" directly). The old architecture already has an existing FPGA re-implementation and should be easy to expand and build upon making something totally disruptive to the computing industry!

[@joesmith-je3tq]

I doubt you would want to pay for my services. There may be others out there who would be interested in such a system and willing to work with you free of charge. Maybe consider joining some of the forums and ask around.

[@wskinnyodden]

@@joesmith-je3tq Do you see the potential of such a design?

[@joesmith-je3tq]

@@wskinnyodden I don't think that matters. Assuming the goal is to make a product to sell for profit, you better do your homework.

[@wskinnyodden]

@@joesmith-je3tq Well, my homework tells me this is somewhat expensive but not exorbitantly so, it also tells me most of the ground work is done, that a software engineer will be needed once the final product is done (but not before if the development guidelines are followed basically re-implementing the Vampire 4 on a A4000 like motherboard) and that once this is ready there may be licensing costs if one intends to sell this in the initial Amiga compatible stage (which is not the exactly the goal). Honestly if I knew FPGA's in depth I would follow the philosophy, build it and they shall come (or once the part of the secondary FPGA interconnect meant to allow the system to upgrade itself was ready and tested try and be bought by someone along the lines of Alphabet's (Google) Research or Tesla's AI engineering dep. But this just this fool of a dreamer thinking :) Hope you at least like the concept though. For myself having a design along these lines coming to the world would be rewarding by itself, having a hand on making it would be better though... Still, I have to admit that my "basic" background in electronics does not cover FPGA's per se and is something I have not used actively since I studied it (ended up mostly on Computer Hardware/Software/Networking assembly maintenance and support along with planning and designing networking infrastructure, definitively not in-depth electronics)

[@joesmith-je3tq]

@@wskinnyodden I wouldn't know what you would consider expensive but assuming you don't have the capital to roll it, you will need investments. Business plan, collateral, projected sales.... I have no knowledge of the Amiga outside of a friend having one many years ago. It wasn't very popular. Being a home PC, very old and not popular seems like a really bad choice for a target market but I assume your homework has told you otherwise.

[@ehsanhaleem1151]

Why you didn't print circuit board? ?

[@joesmith-je3tq]

Cost

[@utyuaty2946]

Could you tell me where I can find the ucode worksheet for 6801

[@joesmith-je3tq]

I suspect you misunderstood what was shown. This is a custom designed CPU that I used ucode to implement, that mimics a MC6801. The worksheet and custom ucode assembler were unique for this specific project.

[@utyuaty2946]

@@joesmith-je3tq Thanks for your reply :D now I understand, it is your own implementation. I am learning CPU designs, I never saw a real microcode for a commercial CPU. Thanks again for sharing your great project!

[@joesmith-je3tq]

@@utyuaty2946 Yes, everything I show in these two videos was a custom design. There are some CPUs that supported some ucodeing in their peripheral. Have a look at the timer for the CPU32 MC68332 for example.

[@utyuaty2946]

​@@joesmith-je3tq wow, first time hear this, thank you very much

[@Impedancenetwork]

So let me get this straight. You did all this with no EE or CS degree?

[@l3p3]

Why are you surprised? A degree is not required. Just understanding and knowledge.

[@xenossolitarius5478]

I have a degree and I can say to you : It slowed me down.

[@kentvandervelden]

I taught at a university for a semester, junior-senior class, and guest lecture numerous times, and am pretty sure the process, at least for software, slows a person down.

[@richardworden9747]

I only ask are you using Windows today ?

[@joesmith-je3tq]

You bet I am as you can see in the most recent video I released: kzbin.info/www/bejne/fXuxfqGnbcp3Zqc At this time, there is no alternative for what I use the PCs for.

[@keshavkumar-hp3jo]

Can you share the code with me I also want to try this

[@ZeroControl]

youtube has just cut of sharing of links within comments!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Share the news

[@MrRobbyvent]

how impressive, windows 2000 loaded in seconds!

[@l3p3]

Roberto Ventilii it is manipulated.

[@mohinderkaur6671]

Windows 2000 loads up faster than current Solid state drive PCs even with DISk and CPU which are much slower!!! Progress!!!

[@38911bytefree]

I have Debian 8 on a Core 2 Duo P8600 with SSD and it loads is in a blink. Its a 4G notebook and its is almost 10 year old HW. As soon as yu dont keep patching things it works like a rocket.

[@Naa-ee7nq]

2 x P5-200 CPUs?

[@joesmith-je3tq]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/eWnXqamjjbp8gLM

[@38911bytefree]

YEAHHHH !!!!!!!. ASUS made many version for SLOT 1 also, dual processors. and at any serve, lets say a prosignia, twin P PROS was common

[@sergiovw1500]

this can run crysis?