If you have bins of old PC hardware sitting around—or if you just like DIY projects—this one's for you. An intrepid YouTuber built himself a functioning processor using a collection of EPROMs, which are outdated memory modules. He soldered parts by hand. He connected hundreds of wires, and he created nearly 2,000 lines of code. Then he capped it off by doing the most logical thing a techie could do with a system: He played The Matrix .
Though the experiment began with him poking around with some old memory to see what it was capable of, it blossomed into a project that took three months and hundreds of hours of work, according to YouTuber Majsterkowanie i nie tylko, or MINT.
Credit: YouTube / MINT
"[The project] started with collecting a large amount of old memory chips," MINT said in the YouTube video . "I started experimenting with them and quickly realized that you can make some really cool things out of these seemingly useless old things."
MINT first created a development board with a memory chip and used it to create a dimmer. After getting a sense of what it could do (and seeing that he could program easily for it), MINT decided to build an 8-bit processor using only old hardware. He kicked things off by building the Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU) and then, with additional research and work, built a more powerful ALU. With the ALU capable of doing calculations, he added memory to store the results, though at this point, memory management was still manual.
"Automatic memory management is enabled by another part of the processor I developed: the address bus controller," he said.
Credit: YouTube / MINT
MINT went on to create a memory and I/O board, noting that "it allows the processor to communicate with the outside world." He showed the top of the board and then flipped it to reveal what looked like gray spaghetti: the wires he soldered by hand to connect the components.
Eventually, MINT had to write about 1,800 lines of code to get the CPU up and running. As Tom's Hardware notes, he named the CPU EPROMINT, combining the EPROM memory chips with his own YouTube name. With a VFD screen hooked up to the CPU, MINT was able to play scenes from The Matrix , albeit in low resolution. The EPROMINT actually ended up being more capable than old 8-bit CPUs, though in a much larger footprint.
