Why build an entire computer on breadboards?

Ben, Thanks for these videos. I'm almost caught up. Plan to add the crystal today and see if I can do the busy flag stuff on my own. Do you have plans of carrying through and doing things with the interrupt lines or maybe a C complier such as CC65?

Hey Ben! I hope all is well. Noticed it's been a little longer than usual since your last post. With the lock down, I definitely have a lot of extra time and am eager for the next. I can usually jump a bit ahead of your latest video and figure things out on my own, only needing to fine tune my approach some after learning new things from your next video...but this reading busy flag bit has me pulling my hair out and Google has me running in circles!!! I'm so eager to move forward. Any hint on when the next video will be uploaded?? 😁

Great explanations with a good pace. I upped my donation. Please consider to add more of the small tips, like the breadboard part in the beginning now in this corona times. I think everyone got time for some longer videos than usual. Or maybe release some lower quality stuff in between. Generally I like shorter videos often rather than longer. Makes it easier to jump back to different topics.

A new Ben Eater video is literally a highlight of my week. I thought I had a reasonable overview of some of the things they are about, but I find with every one I learn a ton of new stuff and for topics I thought I fully grasped I realize that there is much nuance I hadn't appreciated. I feel I'm getting an electronics and computation science education at discount. I'm going to up my patronage a bit in appreciation of this exceptional work.

I noticed the large price difference on Amazon when I went to purchase some more breadboards. To be safe I purchased the exact same model that came with my 6502 kit from you. I have one breadboard that came with a kit of parts that I purchased at the same time and it is a real pain to use. Nothing wants to go in or come out of it. I bend some pins on a chip just trying to use it. Now that I have seen this video, I am glad I spent the extra money. Your demonstration of the cheap construction vs quality construction is great. I am not a huge fan of the cliff hanger but it does give me something to research and test on my own as a break from social distancing and washing my hands.

I poked around your website. Did you have list of breadboard brands that you recommend? Acquiring breadboards that don't end up with a bunch of "sprung" contacts from sticking in big wires (like on a TO-200) or scope probes has been a battle for my entire career.

Great video! Though I had a fealing that after comparing paralel wires to capacitor, this subject got lost. You told about capacitors in general. You added several to breadboard to provide steady voltage. But you kinda didn't told specificaly about lots of paralel wires all over the board which act as capacitors. You only told about signal lag, and showed it on an osciliscope. Or did I missed something?

This animation is another way to look at summing sines wave to end up with a square wave. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8FXF1KjzY0

It would be great to see the clock square wave through your jumper wire demo circuit!

Great video. You need to look up the "Radical Brad" guy on the VIC-20 forums. He claims 40 MHz (or thereabouts) are possible with bread boards with no issue. Not sure I completely agree with that statement. :-) Your evidence definitely shows problems approaching 20 MHz or less.

Ben – just a quick question. At about 22:30 into the video (you're showing the oscilloscope) and you talk about horizontal lines, when I think you mean vertical lines… You might want to check that before you release it.

As usually great video ;-). Btw, I see you own dave's multimeter. Are you satisfied with it?

Outstanding video. The cliffhanger is also good. I’ve been playing with the Z80 processor, and found that going from 1MHz to 2.5MHz caused a headache. Added a whole bunch of 100nF caps across the memory and I/O decode chips helped a lot, and one chip select wire shortened fixed it. So breadboards are great when you try to understand stray capacitance and inductance. So far, so good. Now I’m adding bus drivers to the address lines and bi-directional bus driver to the data bus. Hanging a Z80 PIO and SIO/0 and a CTC to the bus, so I think the drivers will help reducing the load on the Z80 itself. Keep up the great work. You’ll make us all experts on creating our favorite projects. (The display initialization works, but the rest fails because by the time the display is not busy anymore, the code has executed for the ‘Hello World!” instructions which the display ignores while it was busy. In other words, code over-run while busy. Been there. Done that! 😂😂)

I have a question. Towards the end of the video you mention that the first instruction gets executed, the 3 following ones probably don't and the printing instructions don't at all. But doesn't the second instruction also get executed? The display and cursor are on and not blinking. So what is going on there? Great video though!

Love watching these videos, but AUUGHH what a cliff hanger! It might be nice if you add the busy flag check to this video, it would be a nice treat after ingesting all the theory before it. :)

Superb Ben, excellent demo of breadboard issues and the reasons behind it...

Thanks Ben, I have washed my hands and am happy to report Great Video as per usual. I have found the issues with cheap breadboards recently and would like to know where you get yours.

Ben, you are doing amazing work! So I've upped my contribution to do my little part.