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Watching Ben's videos inspired me to finally assemble my Brainfuck-based CPU. That is to say, its native instruction set is Brainfuck. https://hackaday.io/proj

Watching Ben's videos inspired me to finally assemble my Brainfuck-based CPU. That is to say, its native instruction set is Brainfuck. https://hackaday.io/project/4237-mental-1-a-brainfuck-cpu/log/59356-hello-world https://hackaday.io/project/4237-mental-1-a-brainfuck-cpu/lo... And a more recent video, showcasing PS/2 keyboard input: https://twitter.com/treykeown/status/867809790294097920 https://twitter.com/treykeown/status/867809790294097920

midgetjones 9y ago
That's amazing! And there was me half-thinking about writing an interpreter as an exercise... Edit: Have you posted this as a 'show hn'?
- jfktrey 9y ago
  Not yet! I have a bit of work to do before trying to show this project. There's a MENTAL-2 being built right now, and a few software tools I need to clean up. Hoping to get it up to at least 1MHz.
yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
Sometimes I forget how crazy hackers are, and then someone goes and builds a CPU... and uses BF as an instructions set. Thank you :)
- aswanson 9y ago
  Exactly, the beauty of the internet is that its taught us that we are not alone. We are legion.
- dTal 9y ago
  It's impractical, but it's not theoretically out-there: Brainfuck is essentially a minimal Turing-machine system. Someone attempting to build a computer based soley on Turing's "On Computable Numbers" might very well wind up with something like a Brainfuck-CPU.
cogwheel 9y ago
I've been doing the same thing for the past couple weeks. http://blog.cogwheel.info/2017/05/ttl-brainfuck-computer-part-5.html http://blog.cogwheel.info/2017/05/ttl-brainfuck-computer-par...
- jfktrey 9y ago
  Slick work! I've been on the hunt for similar projects to compare approaches, but I haven't find many implementations outside of FPGAs. I like the approach for handling [ and ]. My design is "dumb" in the sense that it uses a `scan` register to handle jumping forward and backwards (so it's quite slow). So far it seems easiest to bite the bullet and scan forwards when [ is zero, but have something similar to your stack pointer for jumping back. Building the jump table for both [ and ] on reset is also a nice optimization.
  - cogwheel 9y ago
    Thanks :) I love that I'm not the first/only one to do one of these in Brainfuck (especially in direct response to Ben's series). I have a feeling the approach I take will follow from whatever I decide for RAM zeroing. The purist in me is still a bit put off by the idea of preprocessing. It feels more like a compiler+CPU rather than just a CPU. If I go the "highest address counter" approach where I synthesize zeros the first time a RAM location is passed, I probably won't do the loop pre-processing. I could do a hybrid approach where both jump points are indexed the first time the loop is scanned. This would achieve amortized constant time. I think I could live with that...

midgetjones 9y ago

That's amazing! And there was me half-thinking about writing an interpreter as an exercise... Edit: Have you posted this as a 'show hn'?

jfktrey 9y ago
Not yet! I have a bit of work to do before trying to show this project. There's a MENTAL-2 being built right now, and a few software tools I need to clean up. Hoping to get it up to at least 1MHz.

yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago

Sometimes I forget how crazy hackers are, and then someone goes and builds a CPU... and uses BF as an instructions set. Thank you :)

aswanson 9y ago
Exactly, the beauty of the internet is that its taught us that we are not alone. We are legion.
dTal 9y ago
It's impractical, but it's not theoretically out-there: Brainfuck is essentially a minimal Turing-machine system. Someone attempting to build a computer based soley on Turing's "On Computable Numbers" might very well wind up with something like a Brainfuck-CPU.

cogwheel 9y ago

I've been doing the same thing for the past couple weeks. http://blog.cogwheel.info/2017/05/ttl-brainfuck-computer-part-5.html http://blog.cogwheel.info/2017/05/ttl-brainfuck-computer-par...

jfktrey 9y ago
Slick work! I've been on the hunt for similar projects to compare approaches, but I haven't find many implementations outside of FPGAs. I like the approach for handling [ and ]. My design is "dumb" in the sense that it uses a `scan` register to handle jumping forward and backwards (so it's quite slow). So far it seems easiest to bite the bullet and scan forwards when [ is zero, but have something similar to your stack pointer for jumping back. Building the jump table for both [ and ] on reset is also a nice optimization.
- cogwheel 9y ago
  Thanks :) I love that I'm not the first/only one to do one of these in Brainfuck (especially in direct response to Ben's series). I have a feeling the approach I take will follow from whatever I decide for RAM zeroing. The purist in me is still a bit put off by the idea of preprocessing. It feels more like a compiler+CPU rather than just a CPU. If I go the "highest address counter" approach where I synthesize zeros the first time a RAM location is passed, I probably won't do the loop pre-processing. I could do a hybrid approach where both jump points are indexed the first time the loop is scanned. This would achieve amortized constant time. I think I could live with that...