[James Sharman] designed and built his own 8-bit computer from scratch using TTL logic chips, including a VGA adapter, and you can watch it run a glorious rotating cube demo in the video below.
The rotating cube is the product of roughly 3,500 lines of custom assembly code and looks fantastic, running at 30 frames per second with shading effects from multiple light sources. Great results considering the computing power of his system is roughly on par with vintage 8-bit home computers, and the graphics capabilities are limited. [James]’s computer uses a tile map instead of a frame buffer, so getting 3D content rendered was a challenge.
The video is about 20 seconds of demo followed by a detailed technical discussion on how exactly one implements everything required for a 3D cube, from basic math to optimization. If a deep dive into that sort of thing is up your alley, give it a watch!
We’ve featured [James]’ fascinating work on his homebrew computer before. Here’s more detail on his custom VGA adapter, and his best shot at making it (kinda) run DOOM.
Impressive !
However making a rotating sphere would have been easier.
Sure, and then cheat like how the Amiga did it.
That seems like way more colors of way more illumination than should be strictly necessary for a CPU to function, even one that’s as big as a tabletop. But, I suppose the allure of blinkenlights is timeless and irresistible.
Whoops. Not sure how this ended up as a reply to you, jbx. That was not my intention.
hahah today i love a project and i’m all the more upset that i’m offered a series of youtube videos instead of like his project diary which obviously must be something by this point
I’ll second this. It’s clearly a fantastic project, and a handful of videos really doesn’t do it justice!
You must have very big hands!
The entire series is around 200 videos now. I can see preferring written materials, but you can’t really complain that James hasn’t documented things enough.
Fair point, on a second look. I think I confused it with the chapter list. Guess that’s my next few evenings sorted!
Love it!
This is what a “full stack dev” looks like
That’s a thicc dev.