I built my own graphics card

hope this baby can mine me some bitcoin

EDITOR: NeoVim
THEME: palenight
RESOURCES:
The Elements of Computing Systems by Noam Nisan and Shimon Schocken

[yourboiivan]

Now I realize what a dog understands when a human speaks with it

[jackb]

This man single handedly solved the graphics card shortage. What a legend.

[gauribadukale]

It just commendable how unimaginably complex these things are props to the engineers who designed them. Respect

[sargates]

7:26 was the only part i kind of understood because of my entry level redstone knowledge

[laurencevanhelsuwe]

I'm a 55-yr old software engineer, and this video is one of the coolest I've seen on YT for ages. Loads of respect for your beginner's guts. This is how real engineers are made.

[LBSiUK]

He's gonna build an entire PC company from scratch at this rate.

[nezbrun]

I designed and built a number of GPUs out of TTL in the 70s, although we called then VDUs back then.

It's interesting to see your approach... I can see you're a software guy!

One of the engineering challenges back in the mid 70s was to use the minimum number of chips. Also back then we didn't have any chips beyond 7419x. The cheapest counters were the 7490 and 7493. Also RAM was expensive.

The designs typical of the day used 256 visible pixels across and 256 visible pixels down, 320 by 320 including front & back porches plus vertical blanking period. Using a 5MHz clock, this gave the 15625Hz Hsync frequency. The Vsync works out at about 48.8Hz, good enough.

Divide by 320 is achieved with 7493 binary counters configured as div-by-32, plus a 7490 div-by-10. When the MSB goes high, that's the blanking periods. Sync timing is achieved with 74123 monostables: digital comparators massively increases chip count.

Instead of a complete memory mapped display (remember RAM was expensive), we used character generator ROMs. These presented 8 pixels at a time, which went into a shift register either a 74165 or 74166 from memory. At 5MHz, the character time of 8 pixels is 8/5MHz = 1.6us, which was easily achievable with the ~450ns RAM and ROM we had back then.

For the CPU to access the RAM, we need to multiplex the CPU's address bus with the 749x counters. This was done with 74157s. When the CPU needed to access the RAM, it took precedence over the counters, so you'd get snow on the screen during CPU accesses.

Including the RAM (8 x 2102) and character generator, maybe 30 chips in total.

I was a 12yo school kid at the time when I designed my first one, no oscilloscope, just an analog multimeter and an LED for debugging.

[hansdampf]

Dude writes his own game engines, makes minecraft from scratch, builds his own graphic cards and at the same time looks like a model

[ezrn]

"I'm terribly unqualified to build something like this." - I don't think that feeling ever really goes away.

[embimmer]

"i built a pc"
"what graphics card you using?"
"i BUILT the graphics card."
"but what about the cpu?"
"i BUILT the cpu."

[DeathxStrike]

Usually the rule of thumb is you use one 104 capacitor for ever chip you have on the breadboard to help distribute power along the board so you get even power draw. Also Ben eater made a working color graphics card on a bread board you may want to check out.

[pachow]

I lost it when I saw the jungle of wires. I am really starting to appreciate how difficult it must be to manufacture graphics cards. Shoutout to all the engineers that work on this area.

[syllight]

He's *literally* gonna reinvent the wheel at this rate.

[the_dark_jumper]

Me after a month of work: "Yup, still busy refactoring code."
jdh after the same time: "So anyway, I've built a graphics card"

[XindiMagic]

This was a really fascinating video, I enjoyed it immensely. I enjoy tech content a lot but building a graphics card from scratch. Wow. I liked and subbed. Going to watch your "making Minecraft from scratch in 48 hours" video next.

[vancevoj]

In an electronics class, and I loved this video!

It was awesome for me because I understood literally everything. We build lots of stuff like this on digital trainers. Keep up videos like this!

[yuri]

Developing methodology:
Ben Eater: Lawful neutral
jgh: chaotic good.

[georgeapelgren]

GPU's are getting so expensive, people are starting to build them on their own.

[Loewe]

I rewatched this waaay too often but not because I understand anything but just these small voicecracks here and there im obsessed

[shadowsandfire]

This is a sweet project, kinda makes me wanna delve into it myself, i love how it looks at present its soo cyberpunk style, id make a frame for the screen and just mount all the bread boards round it and enjoy it how it is, the ultimate is design a pcb i guess, a very cool project none the less! Thanks for sharing!