Magic-1 Homebrew CPU
Here’s another impressive homebrew computer. It was built with more than 200 ICs, and has similar capabilities to the original 8086 processor. It was recently demoed running a port of Minix 2.
Magic-1 is a completely homebuilt minicomputer. It doesn’t use an off-the-shelf microprocessor, but instead has a custom CPU made out of 74 Series TTL chips. Altogether there are more than 200 chips in Magic-1 connected together with thousands of individually wrapped wires. And, it works. Not only the hardware, but a full software stack. There’s a ANSI C cross-compiler for Magic-1 (retargeted LCC), a fully multi-user, multi-tasking port of the Minix 2 operating system. a TCP/IP stack and hundreds of programs.
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