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View complete contentsPart I · The Brainfuck Computer
A native Brainfuck computer, built in TTL logic.
Synapse-191 turns Brainfuck’s eight commands into a physical instruction set: a microcoded breadboard CPU with separate program and data memory, a two-phase clock, and dedicated I/O.
Contents of this part
The Brainfuck Computer
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Introduction
The Brainfuck (BF) programming language is an esoteric programming language that is essentially impossible—or at least highly impractical—to actually write useful programs in. Even if you became a very skilled programmer in…
Synapse-191 Architecture
A true BISC implementation is a direct representation of the abstract BF machine described in Section Brainfuck , consisting of an array of memory-cells together with a pointer pointing to one of these cells. The pointer can…
Opcodes and Control Sequences
A control sequence is a sequence of control signals being sent out to various modules on subsequent clock cycles to implement a specific opcode. This chapter will go through each of the control sequences that implement the BF…
Hardware Implementation
This chapter will discuss the implementation of each module and the way they integrate together to make the computer. Figure 14 shows the computer as it was in February 2025. The overlays shown in Figure 15 show where each of…
Supporting Tools
While designing and implementing the computer, several supporting utilities were developed. The assembler ( bfasm ) is responsible for translating BF programs (text) into machine language (binary), the programmer and its…
Runtime Results
In this chapter we show snapshots of the output during the execution of each of the BF programs listed in Appendix BF Test Suite . Each of these programs was able to run successfully at the maximum clock speed of around 250…