I just got the $18 Mensch board with a W65C265S MCU. https://wdc65xx.com/Single-Board-Computers/mensch/. There is a monitor, lots of peripherals and a few bytes of RAM.

It took me a surprisingly long time to get it going.

There is no attempt to mark the pins on the serial header or documentation; it took me a while to find a reference to expected baud rate etc. I suppose WDC is known for inadequate documentation.

I spent a couple of hours looking for an FTDI usb-serial board with handshake as per FTDI 6-pin standard. It turns out I could have used a no-handshake 0.50c cable (I have a bunch of these) as the monitor crawls at 9600 bps.

Still not bad for $18. I think they charge more for the chip.

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In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. ...Jan van de Snepscheut

And I am stuck

* The inbuilt monitor seems to accept only S28 files for uploading
* The only example I found https://www.mikekohn.net/micro/mensch_led_blink.php requires naken_asm;
* naken_asm generates hex files only;
* easysxb loader locks up and I haven't been able to get it to accept keyboard input.

I suppose I could whip up a quick hex->S28 converter, but I hate doing it on a board I've never loaded code on...

any help is always appreciated.

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In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. ...Jan van de Snepscheut

This is the one I've used before: http://srecord.sourceforge.net/ I linked to it in the middle of the front page of the large look-up tables section of my site, at http://wilsonminesco.com/16bitMathTables/ :

Since my own Needham's EPROM programmer software seems to have a bug in it for large files (and Needham's is out of business), I went on a quick search and found SRecord 1.60. Initially I just wanted to confirm that my Intel Hex files were valid and error-free as far as Intel Hex goes; but this software also lets you transform EPROM file types, concatenate, split, etc.. Version 1.52 is in the Ubuntu (Linux) software center for one-click download and installation. Enter "EPROM" for a search term and it comes right up. SRecord is command-line-only, which initially made it confusing because I didn't see any new icons and couldn't find it under "Applications". The voluminous .pdf manual could stand to have better command-line examples, but you'll figure it out. Much of the manual is spent on telling about multitudes of file types you will never use, so there's not really that much that you have to read.

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http://WilsonMinesCo.com/ lots of 6502 resources
The "second front page" is http://wilsonminesco.com/links.html .
What's an additional VIA among friends, anyhow?

Thanks - totally forgot about srecord - I used it a lot 10+ years ago...

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In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. ...Jan van de Snepscheut

Yep, srecord is what I was about to mention. Welcome back enso, it's been a while!

I thought I must've missed something before when I tried to download WDC tools for Linux, but it is in fact what it says on WDC tools page:

"All tools current work on Windows Platforms (XP/Vista/7/8). For Mac OSX user 65xxTools have been successfully tested on VMware Fusion."

It always jars me to find that people still use windows. You'd have to pay me a lot of money to go back to that nightmare. Especially now that Linux is better in every way imaginable (although a nightmare of a different shade, I suppose - but at least free in several ways)

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In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. ...Jan van de Snepscheut

On the positive note, I got the example running. The magic SRECORD sauce, for future reference, is

A minor snag:
* SRECORD writes an 05 record at the end (with a count of data records);
* Mensch monitor seems to expect an 08 record (24-bit start address) as the terminator;
* Monitor seems to lock up after receiving an 05 record, becoming unresponsive to input.
The documentation states that ESC will end the S28 input mode, but I haven't had any luck reviving the system without pressing the RESET button.
I will investigate more after I make a cable. Pulling connectors to turn off is too painful - my makeshift breadboard flickers every time I sneeze. But it's progress.

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In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. ...Jan van de Snepscheut

Following up on the above, I think there is a bug in the Mensch terminal. S enters the S28 mode, and the documentation states:

Escape does not seem to do it.

I thought my terminal (gtkterm) may be eating escapes, but sending $1B as a hex number does nothing.

Sending "S804000000FB" <ENTER> returns the monitor to the prompt. "S8" <ENTER> seems to work too.

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In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. ...Jan van de Snepscheut

Actually, I did the initial testing for WDC Tools on OSX running Fusion back in 2013 using Win 7 Pro 64-bit. Back then I had purchased a license for WDC Tools and had some issues getting the key installed, so they had to generate another one or two to get it working on Win7. I still use this environment even today, albeit with HighSierra or Mojave release of OSX and the latest version of Fusion.

I probably dislike Windows more than most, due to part of my career back in the 80's and 90's... but I'm still using the same Win7 Pro 64-bit VM/License to run the following:
- WDC Tools
- Dataman Programmer software
- WinCUPL
- ExpressPCB

I've not bothered to try using Wine on any of the Linux distros for the above apps (as Linux would also be running in a VM under Fusion), as Win7 works fine for these apps (okay, WinCUPL is poor on all versions of Windows), but I setup a share drive from OSX that contains all of my code and just use the Win based tools for what they are. It's been a solid system for 6 years now. I also use SlickEdit on OSX for editing all source code and use Serial terminal program on OSX for a console to my 65C02 projects via a FTDI interface.

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Regards, KM
https://github.com/floobydust