Project Ember

Tom Gambill

Ember Update

This project continues to move forward, slowly, but my computer game consulting company IARItech.com has been busier than ever, taking up a…

2 min readNov 10, 2022

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Ember Debugger — Source-level stepping, breakpoints, register and memory inspection

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Tom Gambill

Vintage Computer Festival East 2022

It is great to be here in person and meet some of the people responsible for starting the home computer revolution almost 50 years ago!

2 min readApr 22, 2022

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Bill Herd and Al Charpentier

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Tom Gambill

The Ember CPU — Initial Design Part 7: Interrupts

Traditional CPUs have built-in interrupt handling functionality. The Ember CPU Interrupt handling is completely programmable.

8 min readApr 1, 2022

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Woman Interrupts conversation to take call

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Tom Gambill

The Ember CPU — Initial Design Part 6: Jumps and Conditional Branches

This time we look at how branching and jump instructions work for the Ember CPU.

7 min readFeb 13, 2022

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Branches in a tree

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Tom Gambill

The Ember CPU — Initial Design Part 5: Load-Store and Memory Instructions

In a load-store architecture CPU, we need separate instructions to move data to and from main memory. Lets take a look at those.

7 min readJan 31, 2022

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The Ember CPU — Initial Design Part 5: Load-Store and Memory Instructions

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Tom Gambill

The Ember CPU — Initial Design Part 4: Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU)

Using our knowledge of instruction encoding, we can begin designing the instruction set for our CPU, starting with the ALU.

5 min readJan 10, 2022

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Clockwork Gears

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Tom Gambill

The Ember CPU — Initial Design Part 3: Opcodes, Operands, and Instruction Encoding

This time we will dig into some bits and look at how we might encode Ember assembly instructions into binary to run on the CPU.

9 min readJan 4, 2022

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The Ember CPU — Initial Design Part 3: Opcodes, Operands, and Instruction Encoding

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Tom Gambill

The Ember CPU — Initial Design Part 2: Registers

This time we cover CPU registers in more detail and look at a few CPU features common during the target time period of 70s through the 90s

13 min readDec 20, 2021

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Computer Memory

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Tom Gambill

The Ember CPU — Initial Design Part 1: Basic Requirements

The Ember CPU is the main processor in a virtual video game system reminiscent of those released during the late 1970s through the 1990s

8 min readDec 12, 2021

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CPU Circuit

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Tom Gambill

Ember: Beginnings — Homebrew Retro Video Game Console Design

Lay the groundwork for designing and implementing a virtual 1980s-era video game console similar to the Amiga or Nintendo SNES from…

8 min readDec 5, 2021

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Breadboard Mess

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The Plan: Design and implement a fully functional “retro” video game console, with a custom CPU, GPU, Audio Processor, and development architecture from scratch. Engineering background, while helpful, is not required to follow along. Please join us!
Editors
Tom Gambill
Software Engineer, Retro Hacker, World Traveler. And also: sailboats, fish tanks, nature, family, startups…

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