I don't normally do these introductions but maybe I should. After all, I do have a few hundred posts.

My name is Cecil Meeks (friends/family call me CB). I'm in my mid-40's and I have a passion for all things "vintage electronics". I am happily married with three kids and two granddaughters. One of those granddaughters lives with us full-time. I live in SE Tennessee, USA (Hixson...near Chattanooga). I work as a full time Java/JS developer (transitioned from C#) in Chattanooga for a logistics company.

My apologies in advance for the long-winded and boring story below...
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

While the 6502 is my number one favorite processor, it was not my first.

My first computer was the Texas Instruments TI99-4/a. I was 9 years old at the time and my grandmother found one cheap at a Western Auto store (remember those?). I desperately wanted to write video games since I was 5 but in 1978 (when I was 5), parents didn't buy their kids computers. I started programming the TI in BASIC and as far as I was concerned, the TI was the only computer in the world. Until I saw my friend's Commodore 64. So I asked for a C64 and my mom told me when I started college, she would buy me one. LOL. Well, in 1985 I started taking community college courses for a gifted program at my school on the weekends. My mom had no choice but to buy my Commodore 64.

So, I quickly started programming in 6502 ASM. Almost as soon as I got it.

Fast forward a few years when I was 16 and I worked a summer job to buy my first Amiga 500. This was the first computer *I* ever bought myself and I still own it today.

Fast forward a few more years and I upgraded my Amiga to an Amiga 1200, then I got into Wintel/DOS boxes. Well, someone I worked with learned that I still had some Amiga's and she asked if I would be interested in buying a B/W Mac from her for $40. So I said sure! I then caught the bug. Not only did I love programming these computers, I liked collecting them too. And as luck would have it, I then discovered eBay. It was almost brand new at the time!

This was a magical time. Scalpers hadn't heard about eBay nor the "vintage computer" collecting phase. I bought all kinds of computers for very little money.

Over the years, I've amassed a small army of vintage computers and gaming consoles. I've only recently started creating an inventory of them. But I estimate I have somewhere around 80 computers. All made before 1995 with MOST of them made in the 80's.

Now, back to the Amiga 500. I remember reading in a computer magazine one day about this new computer called the Amiga. How it had 4096 colors. I was blown away. While I loved my C64, I couldn't imagine having a computer with 4096 colors! How could that even exist? It was then I started saving my money and working extra hours to buy my own Amiga. Little did I realize that fascination with the Amiga's hardware planted a small seed in my mind about hardware. I'd always been a software guy.

Well, despite the Amiga being almost perfect, I always wanted it to have a little more. Same for the C64. Why couldn't the SID have 6 voices? Why couldn't the Amiga have 16 sprites? Etc. All of these little wish-list items were slowly brewing inside my head for years.

Then one day I was at a star party (I used to be heavy into astronomy) and I overheard two older men talking about an electronics project. One of the men had some type of circuit board he built himself and it had red numbers on it! (7 segment). I was about 19 at the time and I was amazed. I simply had no idea that a single person could build electronic components! I had always assumed it took a large company to do that. I mean, why wouldn't I? None of my friends were into electronics and we didn't have the internet. Everything I owned came from a large company.

Again, that hardware seed was growing.

As time goes by, I dream of my "ideal" computer. A C64-like computer with lots of colors and sprites. So fast forward yet some more and I have my first baby and I'm browsing online and I discover something amazing. Micro-controllers. This was before Arduino. I was very familiar with Andre' Lamothe at the time. I had many of his game programming books. Then I learned he had designed a console based off the SX52 micro-controller. It was the XGameStation.

This was a revelation like I had never seen before. Not only do people design their own hardware, but with super-fast micro-controllers, many of the hard things can be easy! (or so I thought)

Andre' Lamoth's teachings were incredible. He explained how to generate NTSC signals with a micro-controller. Again, I thought only voodoo magicians could do that.

At the time, I couldn't afford his XGameStation (I eventually got one, however). But since he was teaching people how to build electronics, I could build my own circuits using his techniques. So I manged to get a small development board for the SX52 micro-controller. This was an amazing little chip at the time. It had tons of I/O and ran at 80MHz.

One thing led to another and I started work on my dream computer. I would design and program everything about it. The video, audio, OS, etc. Everything. I managed to get my own NTSC video signal working. I upgraded to PIC mico-controllers because the SX series were discontinued.

I managed to generate audio tones, blink lights, etc.

I was having a blast but soon discovered designing a C64-like computer was hard. Really hard. Life got in the way and I lost all interest in hardware.

Fortunately, the hardware tree that sprung from that seed didn't completely die. Several years ago it bloomed again (OK, sorry about corny metaphors...lol).

And here I am today. Much wiser. Much smarter. I never did finish my C64-like computer but that's OK. It's the path to it that keeps me motivated. My interests change all the time so it's hard to sit down and finish a single project. But I don't mind. That's why they're called hobbies.

I still aspire to create that state-of-the-art computer (for 1982) and will one day. But for now, I'm just having too much fun.

_________________
Cat; the other white meat.

Excellent story - well worth the wait!

Ah, I always thought "cbmeeks" was a reference to CBM (Commodore Business Machines) since you are into Commodore stuff.

_________________
- Mike Naberezny (mike@naberezny.com) http://6502.org

I'll second that incorrect assumption.

Could have been "Citizens' Band".

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

LOL. My uncle used to call me "Citizens' Band" when I was a kid and never understood the joke. I certainly get a kick out of my name being some sort of play on Commodore Business Machines. And I certainly own a bunch of Commodores so I take no offense. lol

_________________
Cat; the other white meat.

I was born in 2004, I currently am 13. I've always wanted to create my own video game so at the age of 7, I learned programming in Python but at the end of the online course I was a bit disappointed because they didn't teach things about graphics (who want's to do graphics in Python?). I started programming dumb programs like "Rock, Paper and Scissors" or "Nothing Simulator". I quit all the computer thingies for 4 years. When I was 11 I took a JavaScript course in Codecademy but I didn't do anything useful with it. For the next 6 months, all the videos I saw were nothing but telling how bad JavaScript was, so I learned Java and C++. I made some basic calculators and it was in that year, 2016, that I got started into hardware stuff. I saw a video of a dude who built a fully working 16-BIT ALU in Minecraft. I was so dumb that I thought that it could run Sonic The Hedgehog just for being 16-BIT. In that video, he recommended a book called "The Elements of Computing Systems", which I bought. I was so excited when I started reading it. It felt like a journey inside a CPU and I learned so many things. It was September by that time and I started watching videos about computer engineering, videos like: "How a CPU works" or "How computers add numbers" and many other things. Nothing too exciting happened, I just learned more and more things until this year. I got Minecraft on June 25th 2017. Minecraft is not only a surviving game, it also has some form of electricity called "redstone". I joined a world in which people built computers and I started making computers in game too! On July, I learned somethings about old CPUs like the Z80, the i8008 or the MC68K. But out of all those, the one that more grabbed my attention was the MOS 6502. It just has something that makes me want to learn more and more about it and looking for help with the 6502 I found this forum.

Excellent story, thanks! (Digression, continued here: The first part of your journey, where you found yourself making little text-only programs, probably mirrors the experience of a great number of people who got started in the 70s and before. Graphics are attractive, but also a distraction! There's something of a challenge in getting people interested in computing when the examples in front of them are so visually impressive but the programs they could write themselves can initially only be very limited. How to write World of Warcraft? Start by writing Hangman!)

(As for minecraft's redstone logic, I think that's a very interesting medium to explore digital logic. We had a thread here with lots of ideas: you might want to start your own, referring back to that one, or to continue it.)

Welcome! You're the same age as my son. He has taken a Python class in school where they dabbled in graphics. Mostly "turtle" like (in fact, I think there is a Turtle library) where they draw lines, circles, etc.

It sounds like you have two levels of focus. Game programming and hardware. I "suffer" from the same dilemma. It's hard to be great at both.

I think going back to the basics is a great idea. But, it depends on what type of game you want to make. More mass-market games that you will make a living on? Or, just simple games you and your friends play? If the former, I would suggest a good JS library. There are tons of them out there now.

If the later, then learning 6502 assembly is a great way to learn hardware AND software. I would also recommend either getting an old Commodore 64 to code on or just use an emulator like VICE. You could also program some modern NES games too. Lots of options for 6502 development and there are tons of platforms that have great games that use it.

Keep us posted!

_________________
Cat; the other white meat.

LBSC, welcome to the forum !
When I was at your age, I was building my first computer (the 6502 based Elektor Junior Computer) as a hobby kit.

I had tinkered with different CPUs\microcontrollers over the years... but at some point, I always had returned to the 6502.
No matter what skills you happen to have, tinkering with the 6502 seems to be a nice grindstone for "sharpening" them.

Looking forward to watching your progress.

Welcome to our 6502 world. When I was your age, Sputnik had just been launched and everyone was in a panic about it. Back then, a small computer took up as much space as a three-car garage and the dominant programming language was FORTRAN.

Things have progressed some since then.

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

Hello everyone,

Just thought I should give a brief introduction before I start asking lots of dumb questions!
I followed the software track of things, learning my first programming as a kid on the good ol' Commodore 64. One of my earliest programs drew lines on the C64 320x200 monochrome "hi-res" screen. Just lines. (I was pretty excited.) I didn't understand Bresenham's algorithm at the time (to say nothing of scaled integer math) so I called into the BASIC floating-point routines to help with my line drawing. I understood y=mx+b and that was about it! I had dreams of making my own Elite game -- but instead you could literally watch the Commie (that's what my friend and I affectionately called it) draw the lines pixel-by-pixel across the screen! (I think I might have had some overdraw issues....)

Anyway, I have essentially zero electronics background. Only what I've read here, and a few other places linked from here. Undaunted I've already got my first prototype SBC up and running on a breadboard! (thanks to Garth Wilson's excellent primer!) It's not much, but it's mine.

Thanks to everybody for the wealth of information and the support for newbies like me!

Since I just created an account last night, I should say hello and thank you.

First for the thank you: I've been working on a fairly simple 6502 based SBC for a while now and have been relying heavily on the information on this site... and just this evening digging through this site gave me the last piece of information to get the darned thing working (I wasn't gating the write-enable on my RAM by the system clock... oops!). So thank you for all the information and discussion you've all put up here, as it really helped me.

Now for my intro. I'm in my late 40s, and I've been tinkering with electronics and computers almost my entire life. I don't remember exactly when the interest in electronics started, but I know what really fueled it: a RadioShack 150-in-1 kit my parents gave me for Christmas when I was 9. That thing kept me going for ages building radios and buzzers and flip-flops and all sorts of things. I still have it, although it has seen better days.

I first started programming computers on Ohio Scientifics at my school around 1981 or so, but I soon managed to get one of those fancy Vic-20s for home (it had COLOR!). I first started playing with assembly on the Vic and remember my victory of getting a smiley face to smoothly bounce around on the screen using bitmap graphics. I also remember the puzzled and rather bemused look on my mother's face as I excitedly tried to explain why that was totally amazing. A few years later, a neighbor gave me their old SX-64 (a somewhat unusual "portable" Commodore 64), and I used that before I finally switched over to PCs. So, as you can see, the 6502 and I are old friends.

The current SBC I'm working on is a straight-forward unit like much of what's been posted here: 32KB RAM, 32KB ROM, and a 6551. I'll be expanding it over time (I've got some 6526s in the parts drawer), and I'd love to build out sound, graphics, and an SD interface. And maybe I'll use it as the excuse to finally learn how to make PCBs. We'll see where this goes, though!

Great intro - and welcome!

Another 'Hello' here...

(Since I replied to another post a few days ago, thought I'd just say a bit more here)

First introduction to the 6502 was via an Apple II in '78 when I was in school in Scotland. It was a brand new school and we had some of the first in the country. Subsequently did a lot of 6502 work more by accident than design, designing and making little embedded controllers for a university factory automation project - initially they talked to a "big" CP/M system, but latterly a BBC Micro network via bit-banged serial...

I also made a few little systems for myself; Elekor Junior Computer and home-made. The only one I have remaining is this:



that was all wire wrapped and went with a board full of relays and opto-isolators it was fitted to my old (even then!) car as a sort of in-car computer to control wipers (we didn't have intermittent in them days!), screenwash, alarm with crude attempts at monitoring mpg, etc. I think it may have cost more than my car did back then...

Currently have the usual Apple II or 2, and a //c as well as the usual BBC Micro.

I'm planning on re-making a 6502 system in the near future with a few modern ideas, just for a bit of fun, but great to see this community (& the 6502) alive and kicking!

Cheers,

-Gordon

_________________
--
Gordon Henderson.
See my Ruby 6502 and 65816 SBC projects here: https://projects.drogon.net/ruby/