I'm starting to become really nervous about the breadboard-based nature of the project as it grows and becomes more complex. This was really brought home to me a few weeks ago when I had to transport the board to work where I was demoing it to some interested colleagues - the transport went fine and the board made it there and back in one piece, but it was pretty nerve-wracking plugging it in a hoping it still worked!

For this reason, I've started to think about doing a PCB design with the board as it stands today. This would have expansion bus capabilities, allowing me to continue to design new bits (e.g. graphics) on breadboard, but would cement the working core of the computer onto a proper, reliable board.

Before I can do that though, I've decided to revisit some of my earlier decisions in light of this new plan - specifically, the address decoder and glue logic should probably be handled by programmable logic rather than discreet logic as they currently are.

The current design (with lots of 7400-series chips) works well, but is pretty power-hungry and takes up a lot of board space. Previously this didn't really matter, but if I'm now going to be spending $5-$10 per square inch of board space, I want to make sure I'm making the most of those inches. Replacing many of the fourteen 7400s with two or three PLDs makes a lot of sense now - it'll mean cheaper boards, and less soldering when the time comes to assemble them.

My reason for using discrete logic initially was for the learning experience, and I'm really glad I did it. I'm a lot more familiar with the 7400-series now, and have become used to designing circuits with them. I've found numerous uses for them in other projects too.

But going forward, it's time to cut the chip count. With that in mind, I've gotten hold of a bunch of Atmel ATF16V8BQL CPLDs, and started learning to use them (I've never done CPLDs before, so all good for more learning!)

My first stab has been the address decoder (CUPL code here - but go easy on me, this is my first time!) and, in basic testing, it seems to work exactly as it should. It even fixes a couple of bugs in the existing address decoder, including making the EXPANSIONSEL line work sanely and gating the whole thing off with the CPU's /AS line.

Even better, it now takes up one twenty-pin DIP rather than a whole bunch of 14-pin DIPs, and uses less power. I've not actually integrated it into the build yet so may find it doesn't work in some horrible way, but according to the datasheet it should be plenty fast enough (faster than the discreet logic design) and as I say in manual testing it seems to perform perfectly, so I'm not expecting any big surprises (I know, I know, famous last words...)