I put some time into seeing if I could get away with not putting current-limiting resistors on my LEDs, and I realized I could not. My hope is I will get everything right with this board the first time, so I need to play it safe. It makes my design look not quite as good, but that's ok. I originally was going to use some surface mount resistors on the bottom side of the board to keep everything looking clean, but that's a lot of annoying soldering. So I switched to a few resistor arrays.
They block some of the silkscreen, but it's not too bad. I'll be looking down on it from directly overhead, and I'll know what it says. I also labelled each important TTL chip just to make it look a little better and it may help with debugging. I'm still considering putting more LEDs on here - maybe one for each chip when it's enabled.
My inspiration for a good-looking board is the transistor-level 6502 project: https://monster6502.com/
Mine will not be as good as this one, but it shows how much pleasant aesthetics can do.
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