Overview
The project utilizes 7400 series TTL chips in order to develop a custom and homebuilt CPU known as Magic-1, with without using an off-the-shelf microprocessor.
Details
The design of the Magic-1 processor results more than 200 chips connected together with thousands of individually wrapped wires. A full software stack also makes up the whole processor and only the hardware. It features a TCP/IP stack, hundreds of programs, multi-tasking port of Minix 2 operating system, multi-user system, and an ANSI C cross-compiler. This processor is similar to an old 8086 in performance and capabilities as it runs at 4.09MHz. it supports 6 external interrupts, address translation via a hardware page table, up to 8MB memory, and user & supervisor modes.
There are 22 bits of physical address, 8 bits wide data bus, and 16 bits of internal CPU data paths. All operations operate on both 8 and 16 bits mode and each of the instructions causes the execution of a microcode subroutine since this is a microcoded machine.
The Unix-like Minix 2 operating system runs the Magic-1 which is notable for its use of an elegant microkernel paradigm and used as teaching tool.
