I've done this too, and it also took me multiple (3!) tries to get through the entire thing. I interleaved it last fall/winter with Ben Eater's amazing series on building an 8-bit computer on breadboards. I bought everything over several months from China, then built the subsystems as the parts arrived over the winter. You should do that next! Aside from being (maybe even more) rewarding, it looks damn impressive to see all the flashing LEDs and understand what's happening.
Yes! Ben eater’s content accompanies nand to Tetris so well.
I did the 6502 project in which you assemble a computer system on bread boards (wiring together the clock, cpu, ram, etc).
It helped solidify many of the concepts from nand2tetris. For some reason doing it all physically with real chips and wires made it all a bit more memorable.
I’d love to try his other bread board project in which you assemble all the inner workings of a cpu on bread boards as well — I think this is what you were referring to.
>It helped solidify many of the concepts from nand2tetris. For some reason doing it all physically with real chips and wires made it all a bit more memorable.
Hang on a second, does nand2tetris not involve real chips and wires?
This is largely about accessibility. If it’s tied to hardware, fewer people can do it. Additionally, real hardware means there’s additional opportunity for error due to faults in the hardware or environmental variables.
That said, Nand2Tetris could, in theory, be done with a bunch of 74xx NAND chips on a breadboard.
The Nand2Tetris computer is a bad fit for 74xx chips and breadboards. It's 16 bit, for one thing, which implies a lot of chips and a lot of wires on a lot of breadboards, and the usual current problems that come with that. Better have a good source and an oscilloscope nearby. Also, the virtual design sweeps a lot of important timing issues under the rug, so you need some EE chops to translate it correctly to real hardware.
I know of a few people who managed to get a working Nand2Tetris computer on breadboards, but it took a lot more time and money than they thought it would.
