Welcome! Great story - and yes, please do start a thread on that when you feel ready. There'll certainly be interest.

Welcome!

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x86?  We ain't got no x86.  We don't NEED no stinking x86!

Did you work for Xerox at either Dallas Mockingbird or Lewisville?

If so, we may have known each other IRL.

Is your last initial K or possibly M?

Hello everyone, I want to thank all the webmasters, moderators, contributors etc. for making this a great site!

I'm new to the site, so here is my 'background check' to see if I am worthy.

- Started with a KIM-1 some 40+ years ago.
- Moved on to a SYM-1 with RAE and FODS. I can still hear those 8" disc drives clanging away on a disk copy.
- Spent some time with FORTH on the SYM-1 and a TI TM995.
- Got into STD bus boards and put together a 6502 based system.
- Migrated to the PC world and C.
- My job moved me into the world of PLCs and Distributed Control systems so I lost touch with the 6502.
- About 10 years ago I got back into micros with PIC products and C.
- Did a couple of projects with a Raspberry Pi and Linux.
- Tried the Arduino route for a short time to see what it was all about.
- This past year I ran across a drawer full of my old 65xx chips so decided to put together a board.
- My board is pretty standard by todays designs, 8K EEPROM for a SYM based monitor, 8K RAM, a couple 6522's and a 6551 for serial IO.
The goals are to get BASIC and FORTH working with some type of storage and then make circuit boards.

Thanks again for all the wonderful resources and ideas here!

Great stuff - you certainly pass muster! And thanks for the kind words - we all make this place what it is.

LOL! No need to go any further. Welcome, Rooster!

-- Jeff

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In 1988 my 65C02 got six new registers and 44 new full-speed instructions!
https://laughtonelectronics.com/Arcana/ ... mmary.html

Hello there. My name is Bill and I'm a 6502holic.

I learned PDP 11 assembly in college in 1974, and knew I was destined to be a programmer. 10 years later, I got my first personal computer; an OSI with dual 8" drives, and a Televideo 925 terminal, where I did some really serious assembly.

My goal, to get back to my 6502 roots, is to rewrite the boot ROM from my old OSI computer to include a real bios for the keyboard, VIA, PIA, ACIA, and SPI for disk boot/storage using FAT32 format. I realize this is a very ambitious undertaking, but I'm retired at 66, have the time, and the cost of all this will be minimal (I keep telling my wife).

Garth has been extremely friendly and helpful already, and I hope to learn a lot more from him and others on this forum, and reach my goal.

So long, and thanks for all the fish!

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x86?  We ain't got no x86.  We don't NEED no stinking x86!

I was always into computers and electronics as a kid in the 90s, but I eventually ended up going to school for theatrical production. Lots of spreadsheets, long hours, and picking things up and plugging them in. I did learn the basics of Ohms law in an Electrics course but that's really the only post-high school education I had on computers or electronics.

Fast forward a few years, and I jumped from selling tickets for a theater at minimum wage to working for the ticket software company. Eventually I moved into Big Software, and left theater behind.

Acclimating to working for a software factory has been strange. Almost everything I know is completely self taught. While I was first making the move, "The Elements of Computing Systems" aka NAND2TETRIS changed my perspective completely.

More recently, I've had more free time to play with Arduinos and Pi Picos, "Robot Parts." I discovered a certain youtuber's 8-bit breadboard computer series and felt similar revelations as to when I did NAND2TETRIS - this time having to worry about real world details and thinking about how the various logic chips evolved to work in smart and useful groupings (not just the open pasture of gates in HDL). I watched BEs 6502 videos and simultaneously started reading 6502 resources here, on Garth's site, and started buying up vintage Rodnay Zaks books (and have developed a strange new hobby, repairing paperbacks!). Thanks to that deeper level of detail in Garth's primer, I managed to assemble a breadboarded 6502 computer prototype that ran at 8MHz.

I finally made the leap from lurker to signing up an account and posting my introduction because after a week or so struggling with KiCad (it's not quite like Vectorworks, the CAD tool I learned in college!), I finally got my first five PCBs ordered. After a failed order attempt last night (oops, I forgot a board outline...) I took an extra hour to throw on a second VIA and make room for a label once I name the machine. I'm certain this board won't work on the first try, but I'm quiet excited to finally be learning PCB design.

I'm still very much in my "gear acquisition syndrome" phase, there's nothing better right now than seeing the Jameco or Adafruit box in the mailbox, but once I've cobbled together the Rev A board and rewired a simple display module, I'm excited to start really _writing_ 6502 asm instead of just reading lots of samples!

Thanks to you all for the advice I've mined from old posts and while lurking. Can't wait to start a thread once this board arrives and I figure out how to get it working!


0: yes, the wrong sized capacitors are on that rendering, but I can't be worried about that can I?

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https://github.com/Individual-Solid/

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x86?  We ain't got no x86.  We don't NEED no stinking x86!

Indeed, welcome Individual_Solid, an excellent intro and journey. From Elements to Zaks - the opposite direction to most, but then you are travelling back in time. I look forward to your project thread!

My experience with the 6502 goes back to the first computer I ever used - a Commodore PET, back in 1979 at school. Started out programming in BASIC, like you do, and playing games like Space Invaders ... like you do. One day I thought, let's have a look at the space invaders program and try to see how it works. So I loaded it and typed "LIST" instead of "RUN". It's only got one line:

10 SYS(1039)

I guessed it must be all written in machine code. From there I learned the 6502 instruction set and all the opcodes. There was no assembler on the PET, so I would write programs directly in hex using the monitor on the PET - the one which printed out memory like this:

.F9F0: A9 40 8D 00 0D 78 A8 A2
.FA00: FF 9A E8 8E 00 FE 8E 8D

After dumping memory you could use the cursor keys to move up to the memory dump, type over some of the byte values and press RETURN. The monitor would read the line back from the screen memory and interpret it as a command. A line beginning with a . was a write memory command, so it would write the modified data to memory.
After a while I acquired an Acorn Atom with 1KB of RAM, later expanded to a luxurious 4KB by the addition of 6 x 2114 1Kx4 SRAM chips. Then in around 1984 I acquired an Acorn Electron. I wrote quite a few programs for that including games (breakout, space invaders), multiprecision floating point routines, a rudimentary word processor, and of course an imitation of the PET monitor including the screen scraping behaviour (OSBYTE &87 would return the character at the cursor position...)
Towards the end of the 1980s I heard about this fantastic processor called the 68000. I got a copy of "68000 Assembly Language Programming" by Kane, Leventhal and Hawkins - I already had "6502 Assembly Language Programming" by Leventhal. It was awesome - compared to the bare-bones 6502 instruction set, the 68000 was unbelievably opulent. So I decided to build a second processor board for the Electron with a 68000 on it. It took a while, lots of other things got in the way, but eventually in 1990 I did build it. There were 3 boards - one board had a 6821 and 6522 as I/O expansion for the Electron (mapped at &FD80 and &FD00 respectively), the second board had 16KB of "Sideways" RAM and 32KB of Sideways EPROM for the electron, along with the logic to decode addresses and recognise writes to the "page register" at FE05 and capture the page value. The third board had the 68000, 256KB of SRAM (8 x 62256), 4KB of EPROM (2 x 2716) a 6821 and a 6522. The 68000 communicated with the electron via the two 6821 devices (Port B output in each direction connected to Port A as input on the other side, with CB2 and CA2 used as strobes to indicate data has been written/read).
I got it all working and wrote lots of stuff for it, including an implementation of BBC BASIC for the 68000. Recently (probably 10 years after the last time) I got it out of the cupboard and fired it up again. Disaster! The electron still works, but the extension doesn't. A bit of poking around suggests the problem is with the Sideways memory board.
I haven't built anything for a while so I thought it might be good fun to make a proper board instead of the one I have. Then I thought I could use a PLD instead of loads of discrete 74xx chips and maybe put the PIA on the CPLD as well. So here I am...

Work-wise most of my career has been low-level software. For a couple of years after university I worked on some hardware stuff - mainly RF - a satellite downconverter, plus I built an FM transmitter for an RSL (short term licence) radio station. But since then I have mostly worked on low level software - DSP, GSM Layer 1 implementation, operating system kernels (hence the handle).

Fantastic! And again, welcome.

Hey everyone,
I feel like the spring chicken after pouring over quite a few of these posts and I'm damn-near 40 But that's a good thing! This place is truly a goldmine. I got my start with playing DOS games on floppy and grew up playing Nintendo. I built computers for friends in my teen years and cleaned/fixed laptops riddled with malware for co-workers as a sidejob most of my days. I've always known just enough to know more than anyone I knew IRL but not enough to actually get work or start a profession in computing.

I did 3 years of residential over the phone home networking support (never again). I was a bartender for 11 years. Currently I'm in college getting a BS in Philosophy because I'm too bad at math to get an Electrical Engineering degree It would take me 6 years to get a 4 year degree.

I have ADHD and Autism so basically I'm a 12 year old in a 40 year old body that has learned to pretend to know how to be an adult. If I come across as rude or inconsiderate it's not intentional, I'm just special . The concept of awkwardness or social queues is foreign to me so just be blunt with me.

Part of my ADHD is that I get obsessed with things and dedicate every waking moment to new things that can actually stimulate my brain. Last year it was 3D printing and Arduino, which has transitioned into the world of 8-bit and the 6502. I have a basic breadboard computer built with a VIA, ROM, RAM, lcd display running at 1mhz atm.

I look forward to learning from all the experts and hopefully you will be able to put up with me most of the time. Heck, I might even contribute something sometime in the future!

Hello,

My interest in computers started with a 200-in-1 electronics kit from Radio Shack, which started me down the path of electronics and the "Engineer's Notebook" series, and eventually being on a first name basis with the staff at RS. This was coupled with getting a Commodore 64. I had the advanced programming manual, which came with a full size schematic diagram of the computer (which I had laminated). This sparked my interest in what's inside computers and how they worked. Peeking into the insides of computers has stayed with me to this day, in the form of taking things apart, or at least taking the cover off. From taking apart the garage door opener (I'd caused it to stop working, which really P-O'd my mother), to later, as a systems administrator, popping the hood off of $200k storage arrays to see what was inside.

Like some on here, during the pandemic I found myself a bit restless and needing something besides work (which was in a lull/rut for me), when I stumbled upon the Ben Eater videos on YouTube. This got me back on the path of computers and electronics, and it re-sparked this childhood obsession. I built the breadboard 6502, I got a soldering station and built Dawid Buchwald's open source computer. Then I logged into Easy EDA and designed a two layer board for the breadboard computer (which worked!).

I am in awe with what is available and what is possible. As a hobbyist, I can use free software to design a multi-layer circuit board and have it manufactured? Five copies of my board arrived at my doorstep for less than $7 USD. I'm not sure my child self could have imagined this.

So here's where I am now. I have a scope (I picked up a Siglent), a DMM, a cheap logic analyzer, a bench power supply, and the desire to learn more. I'm curious about so many things, I think the hardest part will be to pick something to focus on. Higher clock rate? Serial interface? Four line LCD? I2C/SPI? Keyboard? Dual-VIA? I think my next several steps will be on a breadboard, at least.

I am very grateful to join this board, where there are things going on at every level. Not to mention the technical support from professionals, advanced hobbyists, and others like me.

I'd like to maybe proxy requests from a computer to the outside world. This led me to learn a bit about i2c. I couldn't get the 6502 quite working, so I stepped back and got 2 Arduinos talking first. I'll revisit this at some point.


Following Eater's VGA video. This was also a lesson in patience and debugging. All the papers were checklists and notes to track down all the errors in my wiring.


I wanted to learn PCB design, so I learned the basics of EasyEDA, read board design requests/comments, and designed this. It worked! Now I have a "permanent" version of the BE6502 I could use for further development.