Photo:JamesNewman

In James Newmans living room is a monument to our kind of crazy. Seven 2-meter-tall panels are
covered with circuit boards festooned with blinking lights. It is a complete working CPU, plus 256 bytes of
RAM and an input/output interface, all built out of 42,300 hand-soldered discrete transistors.

It took Newman some four years and roughly 40,000 sterling (about US $52,500) to build and design the socalled Megaprocessor (http://www.megaprocessor.com/) in his home in Cambridge, England. In some

absinthe-tinged sense, the project is the logical end point of his software writing career. Newman explains

that, over the years, he found himself doing increasingly low-level programming, and so became more and
more interested in the underlying hardware. He says he began working on the Megaprocessor because he
wanted to build a processor to see how a real one worked.

The end result is a surprisingly full-featured machine. Its 16-bit, with 8-bit opcodes, and basic pipelining

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instruction_pipelining), where the next instruction is fetched as the first is

executed. All 256 possible instructions (http://www.megaprocessor.com/instruction_set.pdf) are

implemented, including ones for relatively advanced math functions. There are four general-purpose registers
in addition to a program counter, stack pointer, and status register. I could have built a minimal processor,
but I dont know what that would have showed, says Newman. He admits though that he did get carried
away a little bit. I quite liked investigating how to do multiply, divide, and square root.

Photo:JamesNewman

(/image/MjgxMDkzMQ.jpeg)

Full Frame: TheMegaprocessorisbuiltonsevenframes.

Subsections of the processorsuch as binary addersare built from custom-made printed circuit boards.

Each logic gate indicates the state of its inputs and outputs with red LEDs, and every memory cell similarly

uses an LED to indicate its contents (driving the LEDs is actually responsible for most of the approximately

500 watts the Megaprocessor consumes). The boards are wired together on frames, with each frame making

up a major system, such as the arithmetic logic unit or the instruction decoder. The CPU clock can be halted at
any point or varied between about 1 hertz and 8 kilohertz (fast enough to play Tetris), and an optional 32
kilobytes of external memory (implemented using boring old integrated circuits) is accessible via the
input/output interface.

In part, the relative complexity of the processor was a

trade-off intended to reduce the amount of effort

required for the construction of the internal memory.

You dont have the whole picture unless you show

what is going on in the memory, says Newman, but I

quickly realized that building the memory was going to

be as painful as building the processor. That kind of
pushed toward increasing the capability of the

processor, so I didnt need as much program data.

(The memory accounts for 64 percent of the
Megaprocessors transistor count.)

The biggest setback in building the Megaprocessor

came right at the end of the assembly. Newman ordered

a last batch of about 4,000 transistors. I ordered the

right ones, and the packing list said they were the ones I
wanted, and they looked like the ones I wanted. So I

used them all. But when Newman began testing the

completed boards, nothing worked. It took a while

before I realized the full horror of what had happened,

he says: The final batch had been the wrong kind of
transistor. I wasted about a month of tedious

soldering. It was bad enough having to do that again,

but it was worse because I felt Id finished the

soldering, says Newman. Yes, we can laugh now, but

it was a bad day.

Newman is currently in discussions about finding a

permanent home for the Megaprocessor, where the

general public will be able to view it without requiring

an invitation to his house. In the meantime, if you want

to try your hand at programming this masterpiece of
transistorized glory, you can download a simulator

(http://www.megaprocessor.com/programming.html)
for the Windows operating system from
http://www.megaprocessor.com

(http://www.megaprocessor.com).
Photos:JamesNewman

Eachframeholdsamajorsubsystem[top]suchasthe

arithmeticlogicunitortheinstructiondecoder.Subsystemsare
builtfromcustom-printedcircuitboardswiredtogether.

TransistorsandLEDsaresolderedintoeachboardsothatthe
inputsandoutputsofeachlogicgateareindicated[bottom].

This article appears in the October 2016 print issue as

The Megaprocessor.