Close

Vacuum tube computer emulator: hardware

A project log for DekatronPC

Silicon-free computer on vacuum and cold-cathode tubes with pure brainfuck instruction set

artem-kashkanovArtem Kashkanov 06/07/2021 at 08:200 Comments

Main milestone is almost done.  FPGA-based emulator became more real as before.

The idea of making emulator is to develop whole logic-level architecture of the future vacuum tube computer on Verilog.

Initially we have nothing to check the idea, but with the first physical emulation block we can "build" the computer schema, test it, debug it, improve it and we would get fully-functional computer, which can perform brainfuck programs.

After this milestone would be done, we can start assembling any computer block as physical parts. e.g. - build IP counter or opcode decoder and so on. This physical block would replace emulated parts and we would get fully functional computer again.

With replacing other emulated blocks with the physical finally we could remove emulator and would get fully functional fully-built vacuum tube computer.

Currently, emulator contain DE0 nano Soc dev board, demux I\O board for indicator part and text display, nixie display for counters and a keyboard. Further, some high-speed I\O boards would be added.

Discussions