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PostPosted: Sun Feb 26, 2012 10:56 pm 
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Hello :)

My name is Josh and I am an NES Tetris enthusiast. I am actually pretty good at the game, but I want to be a "Master". What I mean by that, is there are about a dozen or so people who are certainly better than me (probably more than that but who knows), and they all met up a couple years ago and had a tournament to crown the ultimate Champion of Tetris. They even made a movieabout it.

Anyway, I want to compete at the 2012 Classic Tetris World Championships, and I am trying to cross the the last hurdle from "good" to "great". Messing around with emulators, I was able to make some basic training devices for the NES Tetris ROM. I had been thinking about getting a Game Genie so that I could use the same training devices on a real NES and Tetris cart.

I saw a Game Genie for sale at a thrift store last week, and almost bought it, but I didn't. Through a strange series of circumstances, I ended up not working two days later, but showed up for work, even though I didn't have to be there. Well, I have to drive into town to go to work, and there I was, in town, with nothing to do. I was driving, about to leave town, and then I remembered that Game Genie. Was it fate that brought me to town to buy the Game Genie? Maybe.

Anyway, I tried using my NES emulator's Game Genie converter to make the codes I had been using, but to my surprise, it didn't work. In a rude awakening, I discovered that I had been manipulating the RAM, not the ROM, and Game Genie's only manipulate the ROM. Tony Hedstrom got me pointed in the right direction, but I had to learn some of the 6502 language to figure out what was going on with the program, and what I needed to do to it to get the results I wanted.

I took a computer programming class in high school, and I loved it, but I was only one of about eight students in the class, and none of them wanted to take the next course, so it wasn't offered. I forgot most of what I learned, but I am familiar with the nature of programming language. My emulator's debugger translates a lot of the op codes into assembly language, but it also messes some of them up as well. So it took me a while to figure out that I had to ignore the debugger's translations, and then I saw the pure code, and suddenly I was able to figure out how it all worked. So once I had the part of the program I was working with translated into my brain, it was easy to figure out a way to make it do what I wanted it to do.

Here I am, rambling on. I didn't realize. I will try to finish up quickly. I made my first Game Genie code the day before yesterday. I tried making another one last night, but I kept getting caught up in following the program rather than focusing on what I was concerned with and figuring out what I needed. I worked on another Game Genie code today, and got that one figured out after a lot of struggle with AND :oops: I couldn't find any resources that explained it very well, and finally found myself here. Thanks for the help :D

What I am trying to say is that it is fun making Game Genie codes, but I am totally captivated by the entire program, and I am having a blast learning and figuring out the 6502 assembly language. As it turns out, Nintendo was going to make Tetris a 2-player game, and they have a lot of it programmed into the ROM, but they never finished it. It may be a lofty dream, but I would like to learn enough 6502 to sort of patch together a workable game some day, unless somebody has already done that :P

That's the story of how I found myself here. I am looking forward to learning more about 6502 :D


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PostPosted: Sun Feb 26, 2012 11:22 pm 
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Joshua L. Tolles wrote:
Hello :)

My name is Josh and I am an NES Tetris enthusiast...

Look out!!! Another one has escaped from the insane asylum. :) Man, I recall endlessly playing Tetris way back when and going bug-eyed from it. My then-girl friend, now wife, threatened to ditch me over it.

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I am looking forward to learning more about 6502 :D

Well, you've come to the right place. Welcome.

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PostPosted: Mon Feb 27, 2012 3:31 pm 
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Greets Josh. As an interest, a friend of mine programmed the game genie originally.

Glad you join the fun, the 6500 series processor....tis the Zen of computing :)

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PostPosted: Wed Feb 29, 2012 12:52 pm 
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Joined: Wed Feb 29, 2012 11:26 am
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Location: The Midlands, UK
Hi everybody.
Just joined the forum, which I found whilst looking for info on 6502 processors. (umm-m, this seems to be the place!!) I'm retired and the 6502 and other microprocs are unfinished business for me.
I was involved with analogue and discrete digital hardware design up until the 1980's when I got diverted into other things. At the time I briefly flirted with design using microprocessors and some machine code work but nothing of any size or significance. One of my regrets concerning my career is not coming to a decent understanding of microprocessors such as the then 6502 and making use of the amazing things they can do.
So with time on my hands (after the decorating, gardening, local community involvement, watching TV, going on holiday, caravanning, long distance walking, running the house and doing the cleaning and cooking etc. (I’m the one at home), trying to get into a rock band, model train, model aircraft, model boat, web surfing, and a few other things) I can have a second look at these devices.
Looking through all the bits that one builds up throughout an engineering career, I have found my old BBC master computer, VIC 20, and a 6502 processor training board and other associated bits in the attic. I shall now go over to an appropriate part of this forum to ask for some help with these bits.
Rock on All!


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PostPosted: Wed Feb 29, 2012 3:02 pm 
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Location: NC, USA
Welcome Josh & TC. Enjoy your stay!


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PostPosted: Tue Apr 03, 2012 2:44 am 
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Location: Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Hello there.

My first computer was an Ohio Scientific Superboard I bought new in 1980 and I learned BASIC and machine language programming on it. I later progressed to an Apple //e and then PCs, mostly running Linux. In my professional life I work as an engineering manager for a software consulting company.

I recently built a Replica 1 and am having fun getting back into 6502 programming and a little hardware experimenting. It's very satisfying to program on a machine where you can actually understand all of the hardware and software that is running on it.

In the old days it was hard to find even a single book on machine language programming (I mostly learned from the book "Programming a Microcomputer: 6502"). The Internet and sites like this one are a great resource for meeting people with similar interests.

The microcomputers of the 1980s were an exciting time for hobbyists who learned to program in BASIC, machine language, or other languages. Some people said those days were gone forever but I'm encouraged by the recent surge in popularity in kits and hardware, whether is is products like replicas of Apple and Altair computers or publications like Make magazine. The Raspberry Pi computer, for example, is not so much about a $35 computer as a platform to get young people interested in computer programming.

I've been posting about some of my experiences with the Replica 1 on my blog at http://jefftranter.blogspot.ca/


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PostPosted: Tue Apr 03, 2012 11:14 am 
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tranter wrote:
... It's very satisfying to program on a machine where you can actually understand all of the hardware and software that is running on it...

Amen brother! Welcome.


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PostPosted: Tue Apr 03, 2012 3:52 pm 
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tranter wrote:
In the old days it was hard to find even a single book on machine language programming (I mostly learned from the book "Programming a Microcomputer: 6502").

Your countryman, the late Jim Butterfield, wrote a number of books geared to 6502 M/L. He was one of the best at expounding on this subject.

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 Post subject: Re: Introduce yourself
PostPosted: Sun Apr 22, 2012 7:49 pm 
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Posts: 60
Greetings.

Good to see the interest in good old 6502 is still there. Rockwell AIM 65 is where I learned programming, using the plain monitor (Advanced Interactive Monitor, they called it) before transitioning to the Assembler (using the key/command N unless my memory is getting too rusty).

Assembly programming skills was the basis for a few of my jobs later on, including the DSP56300 having the same nice orthogonality that I got used to with 6502. Unfortunately the DSP56300 series was launched in a questionable state and various IO did not work as advertised. I almost got to work on ARM Piccolo but mysteriously it was never quite available, anyone know the story on that one?

Since then I have left the world of professional programming but I have never forgotten how it started for me.


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 Post subject: Re: Introduce yourself
PostPosted: Mon Apr 23, 2012 12:46 am 
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Location: Croatia
Hi, and welcome to the community!


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 Post subject: Re: Introduce yourself
PostPosted: Tue May 15, 2012 4:50 am 
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Posts: 1004
Hi all.

Kind of amusing, thought I'd share.

I've been lurking on and off over the years as interest in this stuff waxed and waned. Then the post about the KIM-1 for sale showed and I decided to register to put in my 2 cents.

Turns out I was already registered...9 years ago! DOH! With a whole 1 post to my name.

Some legacy.

I've found my way here as many have. School has an IMSAI 8080, Dad had a TRS-80 Model 1 at work, and through my interest I ended up with a KIM-1 for myself. School eventually got some PETs, which were just wonderful (chiclet keyboard and all). I always loved the nice monitors and the PET character set.

From there to college and CDC Cybers and PDPs, while an Atari 800 found its way home with me.

I've been neck deep in computers and computing ever since. Swept up in the wave. Early Mac adopter, early NeXT adopter, eventual, inevitable PC user, now back on a Mac OS X machine for the past many years. I have a Sun SPARC workstation and my NeXTStation up in the attic, and some random PC parts. There's a SB-180 board and media a friend gave me in a box. But truth is, I've never been much of a hardware guy.

But I am interested in the smaller computers. Lot of nostalgia there.

I was considering trying to build one, maybe a Z80. I looked around, and thought about it. I was surprised about the lack of floppy controllers. Kind of a "How do you make a Z80 machine without a floppy drive?" disconnect.

If you're building a machine today, you really need to think it through. Think about what you're trying to achieve. Replicate an older machine? Fit a task? It's easy to look at it and go "that's a lot of work" and end up with a modern SoC or an advanced micro controller. But then you're doing little more than wiring up a power supply.

Is that really that interesting? But, on the other side, do I have to use dynamic RAM? Is a pair of 32k x 8 static RAMs "cheating"? Flash instead of a floppy? Again, what's this project really for? I'm not making a sprinkler timer.

And I decided that as interesting as building up a CPU card from component bits might be, the software side was a bit more interesting to me, at least initially.

So over Christmas break, I just shuffled up and decided to write a 6502 simulator. Scratch the itch that way.

There are a bunch of them out there, but most are fixated on a specific machine (Atari, Apple, C64). I wasn't looking for something that sophisticated. And I wanted to just play with the whole process of building it from scratch. So I wrote one in Java.

I added in a simple memory mapped "terminal" to read and write characters to a screen, that works pretty well.

Next step is now that I have simple 6502 "tone", now what?

I figured the next step was to get a Forth running on it, and so I'm neck deep in getting the FIG Forth listing up and running on my "machine". For that, I needed an assembler. Again there are a lot of them available as well, but, that whole itch thing again, wanted a cross reference, didn't want to rewrite the original source, etc. so I wrote my own assembler as well. I had a nice source listing to test it with, so that's what I'm using. Its feature set conveniently coincides with the syntax and needs of the FIG Forth assembly listing.

So, now, assembler "done", simulator "done", I'm trying to get the Forth started up. This is quite amusing. If you think bringing up machine code is difficult on its own, imagine doing it with a buggy assembler, on a buggy CPU.

Have you ever heard of a zero page JMP instruction? Me neither, but my assembler was sure convinced. Did you know that the TXA instruction doesn't SWAP the registers, it simply assigns X -> A? For some unknown reason, I coded them to swap. My other favorite was since the RTS instruction puts return address - 1 on to the stack, I pop a word from the stack and add 1 to it. Then I mask it with 0xFFFF, only originally I had 0xFFF. Quite the difference. Tests great with 20 instruction test programs at 0x200. Higher up, not so much. Fun working with code when RTS doesn't work.

Now, I'm to the point I need to add break points and better support to my simulator (I'm currently mostly just stepping with the IDEs debugger). I get a couple of words in to the initial cold boot, and then it goes all higgledy piggly.

But it's fun, its not frustrating. Little progress each day, so it's all good.

So, anyway, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. Perhaps I'll share some more later when I get the Forth working and come up with some kind of storage media for some blocks.


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 Post subject: Re: Introduce yourself
PostPosted: Tue May 15, 2012 7:43 am 
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Excellent! Thanks for the story. "Welcome" seems inappropriate since you've been here longer than most - certainly longer than me!


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 Post subject: Re: Introduce yourself
PostPosted: Sun Jun 17, 2012 5:10 pm 
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Location: Almeria, Spain
Hi all!

I'm Carlos from Almería, southern Spain. I work as a IT teacher but have several "retro" hobbies :wink:

My first computer was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, then an Atari 1040-ST, and in 1995 I (Dad, actually) purchased a Power Macintosh 7500 which served me well for many years... I resisted switching to OS X until 2005 :!: with a Mac Mini G4 -- infuriated with its sluggishness, I tried in 2007 to switch to Linux on an AOpen PC... but it wasn't my thing, definitely :roll: So I got back into OS X, this time with a Core 2 Duo Mac Mini -- the small formfactor and silent operation are important to me. On time, it became too slow for my heavy workload, thus I recently purchased an iMac 21.5" Core i5 on a strong configuration which I find of adequate performance.

Well, and I have now several vintage Macs, and even a SGI Indy, but that's another story :)

As you can see, I never had any 6502 computer -- the crude emulator I wrote in C++ doesn't count, right? :wink: But I've been always aware of its sheer efficiency, so I had the desire to design and build a 65xx based computer, some day... Now I have some ideas for a pretty ambitious project but that belongs to another thread :D

I hope my activity here encourages me to go on with it... Cheers to all!

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Carlos J. Santisteban
IES Turaniana
Roquetas de Mar, Almeria (Spain)


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 Post subject: Re: Introduce yourself
PostPosted: Sun Jun 17, 2012 6:01 pm 
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zuiko21 wrote:
Hi all!

I'm Carlos from Almería, southern Spain. I work as a IT teacher but have several "retro" hobbies :wink:

A belated welcome to our forum. In some ways we're very retro here, especially me. :lol:

Quote:
As you can see, I never had any 6502 computer -- the crude emulator I wrote in C++ doesn't count, right? :wink: But I've been always aware of its sheer efficiency, so I had the desire to design and build a 65xx based computer, some day... Now I have some ideas for a pretty ambitious project but that belongs to another thread :D

I hope my activity here encourages me to go on with it... Cheers to all!

Well, if you're planning on building a 6502-powered gadget you're in the right place. Don't be shy about asking questions. We're never shy about offering answers...or opinions!

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


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 Post subject: Re: Introduce yourself
PostPosted: Thu Jul 05, 2012 6:09 pm 
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Hello everybody in here,

my name is Peter Dell aka JAC!. I was born in 1972 and got my first ZX 81 in 1984. When it died due to my soldering skills a year later, I wanted to buy a ZX Spectrum. (Un)fortunately it was sold out when I arrived at the next "big city's" wholesales store. I said "No, I have spent so much time getting here - I will NOT leave without a new computer - I take (pause, looking around in the store) - THAT one".

Well that one was an Atari 800 XL and is it's my beloved machine ever since. After coding on the machine itself, I got an Amiga an developed a cross-dev system/environmentin 68k which connected to my Atari via the joystick ports. I spent my time proving to all my Amiga friends that my 8-bit Atari can to the same cool things as the Amiga if it is programmed efficiently. This was the basis for my passion in coding demos. You can find most of them here. http://pouet.net/groups.php?which=10335

Nowadays I no longer have the Amiga, but I (of course) still have the Atari. (No excatly one, of course :-) ). So I started coding an IDE (based on Eclipse) that bring the comfort and features of modern IDEs to the 6502 coding people. It was funny to see the replies why I posted questions in the Eclipse/Java forum and they always first asked: "You are doing WHAT? Using the Eclipse for coding for a 20 year old machine with 30 year old processor?". Once it was usable in 2009 I also launched my own web site http://www.wudsn.com, from where you can install the IDE right away. I don't want to spam the intro thread with the details. There is this separate thread http://forum.6502.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=2218.

The IDE is mainly targeted towards people who and to do stuff for home computer/console machine for which there are good compilers & emulators available. It reduces the initial effort to get all parts working (code, sound, graphics, emulator, debugging)together, thereby lowering the entry barrier for "new comers" and "re-entrants" who want to code something (again) for their Atari, C64, VCS, ...

So I close with the motto of my web site: "8-bit are enough!"


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