One of my earliest memories of awe when learning how to program computers as a kid was wondering how the computer takes bits in the CPU and turns them into an image on a screen. When you don’t know how most of the system works, it’s easy to conclude that it is basically magic, and that the knowledge was arcane to the point of being inaccessible without tons of background in engineering and science.

As I grew up, this question never really left my mind, and really grew into the more abstract question of how a computer works at every level. Once you get into the high level of software and languages like C and Swift, you can abstract away a lot of the questions into programming language theory and ignore things like transistors and voltage. But peeling back the curtain to reveal what is going on in the circuitry lies a world that is both simple in its principles and ever complex in the myriad of tricks used to keep this wrangled chaos ticking in utter precision.

I started watching Ben Eater’s incredible YouTube series on building a computer on breadboards a couple years ago. I’ve watched the whole thing end-to-end multiple times, and have built (or tried) a couple of the modules, including the clock and the ALU. I went from knowing very little about electronics to having a fairly broad understanding of how circuits work, at least in theory.

On the other side, I’ve tried writing video game console emulators, notably a Game Boy emulator in Swift which works well enough to understand how a higher level system works with all its pieces put together. The emulator is largely unusable (hence why it doesn’t exist in an open source form) but it can run the start of a couple games, generate some graphics and sound, and process user input. Over the years I’d heard about things like Verilog and VHDL being used to define hardware in code. And in the last year or two I’ve gained an understanding of what FPGAs are (especially thanks to the MiSTer project and its focus on cycle-accurate emulation).

So in my ever expanding pursuit to learn how each piece of the computer works, I’ve picked up an FPGA development board, the DE10-Nano, and have begun using the Intel Quartus software to learn how to program it using Verilog. So far, I’ve gotten a couple small and ultra-basic projects working, namely getting an LED to blink based on an internal 50MHz clock and a clock divider, and a basic unclocked two-bit adder. As I continue going down this route, I have a number of project ideas I want to try, including:

  • emulating Ben Eater’s breadboard computer
  • a video generator that outputs something to HDMI
  • an analog to HDMI video converter and scaler, akin to the OSSC
  • an HDMI to analog video converter, so I can play PC games like Undertale on my old CRT TV
  • a Dreamcast VMU clone
  • a basic graphics card
  • a RISC-V CPU
  • some kind of module for my modular synthesizer

Will I be successful at actually building any of these? Who knows! But in the end, I’ll get a few steps closer to understanding how computers truly work at the silicon and chip level. And the journey is definitely more valuable than the destination.