Hello everyone,

I live in The Netherlands and i'm 43 years old.

I was born in 1980 around the time some 6502 based computers came to marked. I did experience some of those 6502 based machines like the Commodore 64 and the NES but mostly for playing games on them. I was about 10 years old when my parents bought a Commodore 64 my father used it for his study at the time. Me and my brothers played a lot of games on it this sparked my interest for computers.

I wanted to develop games back then but as a 10 year old I was more interested in playing games and doing other things then in coding. When I needed to choose what I wanted to do after primary school I wanted to get into IT but my parents talked me out of it because I did not have good grades at school. They thought it wasn't a good career choice either because they thought a career in IT was only for the smartest people. I did not really know what to choose so I ended up in the army and later become a gardener for a while. When I was about 25 years I got into web design and web development as a hobby and when I was 30 years old I wanted to follow my passion so I went back to school to become a software engineer. And that is what I'm doing now for about 14 years.

My first lines of code where on the Commodore 64. I can't really remember what it was that I coded back then but I think it must have been a simple hello world program in Commodore Basic. I dit not code anything after that until I started coding when I was about 25.

As a software engineer I'm interested in everything about how computers work so I first started to learn programming but I also really wanted to know how a computer really works. At school we learned programming and how to create software but not how hardware works only on an abstract level. After some years working as a software engineer I really wanted to figure out how computers work and then I found Ben Eaters excellent video's. That is when I started playing around with electronics. I already had a Raspberry Pi and then bought some Arduino's to play around with Ben Eaters video's on networking between two Arduino's. Later I followed his video's on the breadboard computer and finally on his 6502 based computer.

Now I want to build my own 6502 based computer. I have this crazy idea to build a computer like the early days with an integrated keyboard, controller ports and some sort of video output. It will be quite a challenge as i'm just an electronics hobbyist. I already have most of the parts but I need to figure out how to make it all work and that is why I'm here.

As it will take some time to build my 'dream machine' I wanted have something to play with in the mean time and gain some experience programming in 6502 assembly. So I bought an W65C265SXB SBC (I know it is not a real 6502 computer but I should be able to use 6502 emulation mode). While playing with the W65C265SXB also brought up some questions so you will here from me on that as well.

Welcome! And thanks for sharing your story.

Thank you BigEd