Gigatron Hackers

Hi All, The Gigatron expends a considerable percentage of it's clock cycles generating the 1/4 resolution 64 colour VGA display. However it should be possible to use a shift register to clock out each pixel (monochrome) using a 25MHz VGA clock. This would provide a considerable boost in the processi...

Happy 2025 - I am happy to discuss Gigatron ideas here.

I read your post, I understand your wishes. I met Marcel in September 2019 in Cambridge UK, for a vintage computer festival. We presented the Gigatron to the UK computer enthusiasts. Marcel and I worked on a superfast Gigatron 12.5 MHz. IMHO. Please don't try to re-invent the Gigatron. Leave it, as ...

Hi All, This a topic that has been simmering on the back-burner, ever since Marcel astounded us all with the v6502 and the Apple and Microchess emulation. As a Z80 enthusiast, it would be great to emulate the Z80, but for it's day, the Z80 is a surprisingly complex cpu, with 158 instruction "ty...

Personally, I feel that the Gigatron achieves all that was ever intended of it, plus a lot more. It should provide the inspirational basis for new architectures, possibly with different end goals, and these priorities may be varied, depending on the application. I would like to see a hardware "...

Until about 1952 all computers used a bit-serial architecture in order to reduce the complexity of the hardware. This philosophy continued into the 1970s, so that desktop and handheld electronic calculators could be made economically. The RCA1802 uses a bit serial ALU, to keep the transistor count d...

Good Work, Hans.

Good Work! I like the purple PCB. With a bit of work a Gigatron can be pushed to 10MHz clock, or 12.5MHz with swapping some of the ICs for 74F (fast) series). Whilst I personally have little need for low resolution colour graphics and sound,the Gigatron is a remarkably versatile and fast CPU, capabl...

The greatest advantage that the Gigatron has over any other 8-bit microprocessor is that all of it's native assembler instructions execute in a single clock cycle. I am currently exploring the Gigatron assembly language, and since I have had experience in Z80 machine code, I thought I would configur...

What would have been the price of Gigatron in the 70s? ICs were not as cheap, especially SRAM. Still a good deal compared to a Cray1... I have found various magazine adverts in online archives for TTL ICs from the 1970s. Almost all of the TTL ICs used in the Gigatron were available by 1975. Typical...