That sounds awesome! You should definitely post a Show HN on it. I am going to comment on this though: But I really want to understand how the CPUs work, and t

That sounds awesome! You should definitely post a Show HN on it. I am going to comment on this though: But I really want to understand how the CPUs work, and the best way to do that is doing it myself without looking at the answer key. I am right there with you this, however with experience I've come to appreciate that there is a lot of complexity in this topic and I personally have a limit on how steep a learning curve I'm willing to climb in my spare time. As a result I've taken to trying to isolate topics to learn around things that are known to work. Here is an example ... In 2015 I discovered you could get software radios for $25 and there was a bunch of open source software one could use to play with them. I wanted to write my own modulator and de-modulator code but kept running up against too many unknowns so having it be impossible to debug. Was it my code? Was it the radio setup? Was it the signal format? I didn't start making real progress until I got a real Spectrum Analyzer and Vector Signal Generator. This let me work from a "known good source" and generate signal that I could compare on my Spectrum Analyzer with the signal the VSG generates. THAT let me find bugs in my code and once I understood more of the basics of the DSP that was going on then I could branch into things like front end selectors and polyphase filtering. So I applaud your effort, and more power to you if you punch through and get this done. It will be huge. But if someone reading this were to think this is the only, or best, way to do something I would encourage them to recognize that one can break these problems apart into smaller, sometimes more manageable chunks.