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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

i like what you do man ... keep going ... congrats ... never knew that it was possible to do it this way, thaks a lot and BRAVOOO !!

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.

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

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

Extremely impressive my guy. You're on your way. Please don't give up and keep it up!

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!

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

Ah yes, my bi monthly episode of making me feel like an idiot

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.

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.

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

this is some fucking giga-nerd level shit and i love it

Love your vids bc I love to figure out how things work at their core, I am also majoring in electronics engineering so I have like you built a computer on breadboards

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!

Teacher : So dear students, let's learn how to write hello world program today 😄 Quiet kid sitting at the last row of the class:

When this saga started: "damn, this dude must be a really competent functional programmer" Now: "yay, mental flagellation time!"

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

That's astonishingly impressive! Well done

SMH didn't even mine the metal yourself, 3/10

can't wait to see you make your own ssd. No doubt faster and at a higher capacity than anything currently on the market

Been loving your channel lately. Reminds me of me 25 years ago! Thank you for what you are doing 🙏

Its amazing how far you got. I am seriously interrested in learning this stuff, but fear at 35 I am way to late to properly learn it or even do something with it.

Ben eater has met his match lol

This man is on a whole new level of Technology Edit: People are correcting me on my sentence. Yes, it isn't a new level of te tech. I made the comment when I was half awake.

14:25 cheers man. The sort of pitfall many coders like me not knowing too much of electronics would also fall into. Still an awesome tinker project, love it.

Nice, a young Ben Eater! :) Subbed.

Me who can't even emulate a CHIP 8 watching him make a computer from scratch: 👁️👄👁️

Super cool, I've been very interested in graphics processing lately as it's definitely one of those technologies that's always been "magic" to me. Your drawings + explanations are super helpful, really enjoy this video format.

You’re so cool! That’s an awesome project! Hats off to you!

I tried to build something similar that used the VGA standard. I only got as far as the timing signal generation and pixel counters, because although it all worked, if I even breathed on it, it would stop working for some reason or another. I think the counters I used didn't like the extra capacitance in the breadboards. It was a great feeling measuring all the timings with my scope and seeing it match perfectly with the VGA standard. If I was going to continue I would have needed to build it all on proto board with magnet wire like my z80 computer. I never bothered making a schematic diagram though so it wasn't worth continuing. You did fantastic for never doing any electronics before

Cant wait for when he makes a quantum computer from scratch like 8 episodes from now

This video is pure gold. It's so educational yet engaging and damn you did a great job. I haven't seen a video that made me this hyped for electrical engineering in ages

you genius bastard! amazing mate!

2:32: "a colour blast or something"

Jdh love your work 🤗 what are you going to build next ? an electron ?

it doesn't matter that they are "5V LEDs" resistors don't limit voltage they limit current.

I loved the Video. That was very interesting and strangely addicting. But nobody is talking about how you sadi the Errors at 13:44 were clipping, grey lines and data errors but not "GRAPHNCS CARD" :D Also, huge props for even attemping such a hard project.

Sweet lord - I hope those jumpers don't randomly snap! Several people have done VGA and similar with full-fidelity emulation of NES and even the BBC micro on the Pi Pico board with just a "few" external components. That's one impressive piece of wiring work I must agree. I did wonder if that bird's nest, with all of that stray capacitance was knackering your clock signals though. Very impressed though. Super piece of work.

This is so impressive. Can you imagine how hard famous GPU manufacturers work to achieve today's graphics, if it took you so much to create something so "basic"

Still making absolutely incredible content. Hands down one my favorite channels.

0:53 i never knew what was inside the black box of a microprocessor! thank you for enlightening me.

I saw a bunch of if-elses in that montage, how dare. Great video, really enjoyed the build

Love your work!

When TSMC says that will raise the prices by 20%:

The animations are legendary. Love this video...

Dang, your comedic editing is great! Not too much, just enough!

One thing that you could do would be to read the data from the EEPROM into a shift register and shift the bits out to display them. Shift registers are way faster than memory lookups, and are what is used for things like PCIe and Ethernet signals.

It is indeed pronounced like "pal" :) BTW that's dependant on region, Europe uses PAL mostly, while North America (and some of middle/south America) uses NTSC. SEMAC is also in use in some areas of Europe and Asia

Wow. This is soo impresive!!!! People are awesome!!!!

I freaking love this, I’m a newbie to all of this but love your work, your are such a freaking cool dude and would love to learn from someone like you😮😮😮

I can blindly admire anyone who even thinks that they can do this stuff and sets themselves to do this because the confidence levels and the courage are more important than the end result

In Uni we used a software called Proteus for designing and simulating this kind of stuff, it looks really retro but it was fully featured.

fastest vimrc yoink of my life INSANE video, hope to see more (;

Great job! You can use an FPGA, like I did in college for computer engineering. They are not always so expensive-- the one I was using is discontinued now but it was only $5 - $6 US. Some soldering required! But then just download the logic gates (if you've never used one before). 5 minutes from working simulation to working circuit! Keep up the great work. Also, you're very attractive! Congrats!

Generating a monochrome composite PAL signal with UNO was fun! I never got around to figuring out the color burst either, I just opted for SCART and PAL RGB. no need to try to put the colors in the color subcarrier or use a separate RGB-to-Composite chip. Translating all that to TTL is bad-ass though, well done!

This is hilarious to me, as I went down a very similar road (and same glitches and pain) 7 or 8 years back. I didn't try PAL, but NTSC... but with 'golden arches' of wrirwe mess causing interference (stray capacitance etc), it was making me nuts. I ended up switchign to VGA output, as much more widely available on monitors, and also a _really easy_ signal to generate, in black and white or colour. (Same analog range style to generate a colour or b/w). A couple years back I went FPGA to try and figure out HDMI and got that going too .. and its a lot like VGA but with some evil suppressed-information encoding at the end. Go VGA, and use Eagle or whatevere to get some PCBs printed .. doing it all in jumper wires is fun to a point, then just annoying ;) (When elecrow or jclpcb etc can give you a dozen 4" square pcbs for $10 a week or two after you place the order, its pretty nuts.) You're super awesome, love the videos.

jdh, congrats on 100k!

I did somthing like this in a game that simulates logic gates (scrap mechanic), obviously, that is easier as I don't need to care about voltage ground, power source, and that kind of stuff, and it was 15x15 pixels, and I got to make up all my own video data standards and stuff. It had like 1 fps with the smallest possible image data in my standard. This is a really cool project though, and it is super interesting to see someone build it irl. I can recommend scrap mechanic to you, obviously, it is more satisfying to see a result in real life than in a game, but I think you could have a lot of fun building stuff in it, and it might even be a good place to simulate your circuits before you spend money on your stuff in real life. It doesn't have stuff like memory ICEs, but you could simply make them with regular logic, and copy-paste them however many times you want.

Latches, my man! SN74LS573 or similar. You can use a very brief signal to latch the output from your ROM chip, thus allowing the ROM's output to stabilize before sending the next byte out. It will mean reorganizing your data on the ROM chip by about 1 byte, but that should help.

I absolutely love this man and wish i had a friend like him

Man you are a legend!

I love that you do this. Great content, smarty pants man.

Ben Eater would be proud of you 😂

This guy deserves way more subscribers, he literally created his own computer

This video must have taken a lot of time. Great work.

I am glad that there are some people in this world that think in similar way to me! I hope there will be more like us 😊 I got soo annoyed when I found out how big companies manipulate people to sell more that I just had to start to build things myself really !

Maybe using a FPGA to prototype programs instead of the Arduino would be helpful to translate to actual logic 🥴. As always, awesome job!

you could use an FPGA after you had your circuit layout and test it there before you buy all the ICs. In general using an FPGA instead of programming it in C might be a good idea!

My colleague was assigned to built tele text device to mix running text onto bottom of TV screen, as a compulsory project to complete his undergrad. electric engineering degree. It was 30 yrs ago. And he ended up being retired without graduated because it's far beyond his capacity as an undergrad student then.

it was an awsom project great job1!!!

And my first reaction was - of course you did!!

1:27 I think most people pronounce it like "pal" pronounced like the word for friend. It think it's an acronym not an initialism

Hell yeah, dope as hell. I'll need to know how to do this if I am stuck on moon or something like that.

10:14 yes.

Watching this channel is like watching evolution go backwards.... and I absolutely love it!

THANK YOU SOOO MUCH JDH I HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS FOR SOOOO LONG.

clock latch the output of the EPROM. So your actually addressing the eprom and fetching the next bit, while displaying the latched previous bit, that gives the EPROM the most time to settle, the latch "will" hold that settled output for full clock time. You may need to tweak when the clock happens to get a perfect output, but once found...

You have a great patience. Hope you don't abandon this project.

Great work, I made the Ben Eater video card not too long ago myself. Have you read the TV Tennis schematics from Popular Electronics? It produces a sync signal with a pair of 555's and a pair of NANDs in monochrome.

First Live stream jdh* "You unemployed or sth?"

I enjoy watching videos on subject and projects I'll never be able to do in my life.

this reminds me of (if any CE or any other Electrical Engineer majors here) my Digital Circuits class and gave me immediate ptsd... but in a good way. Found this while doing homework btw lol

Great video. May i ask why you used such THICC cabling? The stuff looks like it'll pass 8A without breaking a sweat

Every LED needs a resistor or something to limit current.

man the way the a's get displayed just... looks really fuckin cool

This has become my favorite video on youtube

Nice. Please make that into a font, also I'd love to see something like this based in software that could be played with.

I'm still waiting for the video where you mine silicone to produce homemade microchips.

You really need some resistors on those LEDs. I tried designing and building my own Z80 computer a while ago. Don't know why it didn't work - I'm sure the design was sound 😕 Joking, of course. Even the EEPROM programmer I made with an Arduino Mega probably didn't work properly. So nice work on all your stuff!

@jdh 11:22 I would like to tell you that the voltage does not kill, the current does, and I=V/R meaning that no matter the voltage, if there is no resistance, the current will be infinite. Meaning that no matter the voltage of your LED, if it does not have any built in resistance, you are likely to kill it, or greatly reduce it's life cycle even if it doesn't die immediately, if you look at datasheet, you'll see that for LEDs there is no really maximum voltage support, but maximum current supported (usually in mA) So people yelling at you are actually correct, and they can't explain to you in short sentences in live. And again I'll repeat, the voltage does not kill, the current does, and I=V/R, the more resistance you have, the less the current