It's been a few ... years ... since I last worked on Detritus. I brought it home after cleaning out my office at work last November, and it definitely didn't survive the trip. So I figure this is a good moment to inventory and document it as-is, and start thinking about the next phase. Building some PCBs that can stand being moved around a little more. (I really don't have space to set this up permanently in my house.)

I think I've got enough of Detritus built that I should be able to design a modular system that re-implements everything I had on the breadboards. But now I'm asking myself... should I keep the crazy logic decisions I made, or replace them with the "right" chips? Like the AND logic, which ANDs together 4 bits using a quad AND gate... and the other 4 bits using a quad NAND gate and some NOT gates. Do I stay with the chip overkill that came from parts lying around, or do I just buy another AND gate?

I'm leaning toward keeping the build as-was - continuing on the path of "the right parts are the ones I found in my house" as long as feasible. That was the original goal, after all - use up all the parts.

The biggest reason I'm questioning that is for problems like the one I mentioned in the last project log -- the program counter not counting well. That's probably related to the mismatched adder chips. If I bake that in to a PCB and it's bad, then I'm stuck waiting for the next PCB before I can fix it. And I've got another piece of detritus sitting around which is an anathema in this project.

So I've pulled all the wires, and diagrammed as much as I could with what survived the trip. Time to take inventory again, and come up with some sort of modular stackable design...