Sounds like a fun project, many years ago I built a POV led wand that used an 8 bit parallel adder made from transistors, a 555 timer and an EEPROM. That might

Sounds like a fun project, many years ago I built a POV led wand that used an 8 bit parallel adder made from transistors, a 555 timer and an EEPROM. That might be a good hello world type project to tackle on your way to the CPU goal.