Buying the hardware and software

[w0051977]

I am a software Engineer and I am planning to buy this book.  I am amateurish in the field of Electronics.

On the homepage there are links to buy the book and a link to download software.  Where do you find the hardware?

I assume that there is a requirements list in the book and you can just go to your nearest Electronics store.  Please can someone confirm that this is the case?

[ybakos]

No physical hardware is necessary. All hardware projects are conducted via a hardware simulator.

[ouverson]

I would like to build physical implementation of computer, along with utilizing virtual hardware development tools; starting with primitive Nand gate. Any information you might have to aide me would be much appreciated. Kind regards,

[Jim Willette]

For my 2 cents worth, the answer seems to be a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). That is hardware, but may require another hardware component to program it. There are several vendors of these parts; look in a James or Mouser or similar catalog. One warning however, the gates in the simulator are ideal gates, that is they have no delay, so you sometimes have to add dummy gates (an and with the two inputs tied together, or similar) to compensate for gates on other parallel wires.

As far as the display, I have not found one that exactly matches, but there are cell phone displays that are good, but smaller. Their addressing may vary; they may not supply a memory-mapped addressing that the hardware simulator uses. With a little digging around (ebay for example, or maybe sparkfun) you can probably approximate what is found in the book, but be ready for a lot of hacking to get there. The simulator is much more forgiving than real hardware.

Good luck, Jim.