Happy New Year and happy hacking in 2025!

[GARTHWILSON]

Happy New Year to everyone.  I'm picking up on the topic Happy New Year and happy hacking in 2016! which came to mind.  Feel free to post your 2025 65xx ambitions here.

The forum gradually changes over the years, as our lives and priorities change, and as our understanding and the availability of new products and tools advance.  My vision of how my year will go is foggier than it was in previous years, especially as poor economy and sales have forced my longtime employer to cut my hours and pay waaaaay down, so I had to find a second job, and this new one has quickly become my primary job.  I'm now working at a place that services controllers for large CNC machines.  I'm starting in repairs, to learn the field, and then it's expected that I'll work into design and development of new products.  This company has never made its own, but the president and the CEO got an idea to do that when they saw my experience.  I suppose the 6502 workbench computer, my "Swiss army knife of the workbench" as one member here put it, will come into play as it has in many past product developments, although the exact rolls it will play are up in the air now.

The ironic thing is that I have the most motivation to improve it or work on a new model when I'm in "the heat of battle," using it continually and not having time to further develop my tools, and then when the project is completed and I do have time work on it, the urgency is off and I have less motivation.

I'm a little hesitant to mention my "next one" again, since I've been working on it, on and off, for years, with long periods of it collecting dust; but I have a dense 3U Eurocard board mostly laid out with an '816 and 12MB of SRAM, four VIAs plus my bit-I/O module (pdf link), and oodles of ports, usable in a card cage or in a smaller package, but I get held up again trying to figure out how to make all the desired connectors, indicators, and switches available along the front edge when it's in the card cage, even with mezzanines.  Packaging really is the hardest part.

I still have a mind to use a microcontroller to emulate a 32-bit 65xx processor, similar to an '816 but with all registers except probably the status register extended to 32 bits.  The performance would not be stellar, but it would give me a chance to experiment with the instruction set, and I should learn a lot.

Another ambition is to experiment with a massively parallel 65c02 computer mostly using parts I already have, laying out a board that would serve as a module that could be stacked with others of the same, in an array.  It would be snail-speed by today's standards, especially as the many 65c02's and 65c22's I have (and will be getting more of, free, from my boss, production overruns from over 16 years ago) are only rated for 2MHz, but I should learn a lot, and maybe even come up with something useful.

I want to do additional development of my software tools too.

All this is in competition with other interests in life, especially my constant study of health (not medicine—those two diverged just over a century ago), and of economy.  (I'd be glad to discuss those, but please make it by PM or email, as it's not 65xx related.)

[floobydust]

Well, Happy New to the forum as well... and I'm actually able to access it while I'm in GA for the holidays.

As Garth noted, things tends to change over time. I've been more busy doing house projects, some car stuff and back into my audio gear for a change. This is now just gearing up (I guess pun intended) as I've been wanting to design and build all new equipment for analog audio... all vacuum tube based of course and spinning vinyl. Perhaps at some point, I'll post some teasers out here despite being off topic. Fortunately, when I'm out of town, which happens for a few months a year, I tend to do some work on the 65xx stuff.

To Garth, sorry to hear about your main job scaling back, never a pleasant experience. However, the fact that you managed to secure another job that's scaling up is a good thing. Hopefully this provides more for you quickly in many ways, not just financially.

As for my current 65xx project, I'm just referring to it as the Pocket V3. As I like to have a small system to travel with, I've started working on a tiny project that is cased in an extruded Hammond case (1455C801) that accepts PCBs. It's about the size of a credit card and 23mm tall. There will be two PCBs that plug together and slip into the case. The main board will hold some base components, like a FTDI FT-231X with a Mini USB connector, a 5V to 3.3V regulator, a pair of TI7533 reset chips, one configured for Reset and the other for a Panic. There will also be a 3-LED stack along with some header connectors, momentary switches and a toggle switch for power.

The idea on this is a base interface board that can host a CPU card that can be based on a W65C02, W65C816, Zilog Z80 CPU and even a Motorola MC68E000. These will all be powered from the 3.3V supply on the base board. There will also be a 6GB IBM/Hitachi Microdrive mounted on the base board with a thin flex cable to attach to an IDE PATA on the CPU board.

The first CPU card will (hopefully) be a W65C02 running at 16MHz, 128KB SRAM, 128KB Flash memory, NXP SC28L92 DUART, a 16-bit IDE port and a DS1318 32-bit RTC. A single glue logic will be used... likely an ATP1504ASV. A new bootable BIOS will make this a simple DOS/65 system with 62KB of RAM and 2KB of ROM which also maps I/O at 48 bytes in the $FE00 range.

This will be a long term project, but hoping to also get other CPU cards designed and built for the the processors listed at some point.

Hoping all have a happy and healthy new year.

[okwatts]

Hi Garth
This may be old news to you but if you are looking at microcontrollers for your new work challenge, there is a fellow (PhenixRising) on the backshed (Australia) forum who is using Raspberry Pi Pico and MMBasic for some of his work. I enclose a link (https://www.thebackshed.com/forum/ViewT ... &TID=17409) that you can look at and see if that is of any interest to you. He has posted enough to make me think it might be of interest in your new field. Hope it helps!

[GARTHWILSON]

okwatts wrote:

Hi Garth
This may be old news to you but if you are looking at microcontrollers for your new work challenge, there is a fellow (PhenixRising) on the backshed (Australia) forum who is using Raspberry Pi Pico and MMBasic for some of his work. I enclose a link (https://www.thebackshed.com/forum/ViewT ... &TID=17409) that you can look at and see if that is of any interest to you. He has posted enough to make me think it might be of interest in your new field. Hope it helps!

Thanks for that.  Those quadrature knobs are a nice way to address a lot of human input situations.  I had to look back at how I did that at work 38 years ago.  Instead of the nested IF-THENs, I used a 16-byte (4x4) look-up table.  The 6502 routine to access it was nine instructions, including a JSR to a 7ms delay (which I suppose was to ignore bounce, since we had a mechanical, not optical, encoder), and the RTS.

I've brought a dozen products to market using PIC16 and PIC12 microcontrollers, which in spite of their many mickeymousities, I tend to stick with, because of familiarity and having my macros and routines already developed; so I think I'll go for the PIC24 next, since I understand the architecture and instruction set are very similar but with far better performance and far more memory available and many of the 16s' limitations fixed (even if some fixes are kluges), and I expect the I/O modules and timers and other onboard peripherals are very similar if not identical.  I've been talking about this for a while but just have not had the situation yet that would force me to stop procrastinating.  The last couple of things I made with PIC16F's were programmers to use in-house, as the boss wanted stand-alone programmers for our bluetooth modules and for other PIC16 products, programmers that the operator could just plug things in and follow the instructions in the LCD and not be dependent on any PC, OS, or anything else.

[AndrewP]

Happy (now slightly belated) new year everyone!

Just chipping in with the current (and only) project I'm hacking on. It's still no where near ready for prime time but below is a sneaky preview of what I'm intending to (finally) build this year.

Back during the Covid lockdowns I decided I was going to build a Commodore 64 like computer heavily inspired by the PE6502 using only in production components. But I both didn't know what I didn't know; and then I got distracted by the 65C816.

Fortunately for the rest of the world the Commander X16 happened because and four years later I'm coming to realise quite how insane the project I've undertaken is.

(I should mention this is a huge image).

Without getting into too much detail: the board at the back with the two growths off of it is the Processor daughter board. The W65C816 just visible as the only chip set at at a 45 degree angle. It's basically a very limited stand alone computer that can interface out to other devices over a backplane style motherboard. The two boards Macgyvered to the top are for debugging or teaching. The left one is the '816 status board seen previously elsewhere on this forum; the right one is completely untested but should show the currently executing op-code mnemonic.

Other interesting features on the Processor board are a private 512KB RAM, 512KB ROM and a megabyte of device decoding. Above that is main memory device decoding that occurs in 2MB chunks.

Which brings me to the Memory board (not visible behind the Blitter board). Each socket can host 4MB of addressable main memory that is shared between boards on the main memory bus. Video memory, for example, is also mapped as main memory and is directly addressable by the '816. Or a second '816 if a second Processor board is installed. Or the SD Card board that can block write directly into main memory.

As a concept: shared main memory this is probably the biggest strength of this design.

You might see a 'chip' board labelled Main Memory Abort on the motherboard. That's in case there is contention between two daughter boards both accessing main memory. It shuts down the main memory bus and NMIs the Processor. That sort of contention should only be caused by a kernel level bug; a user program should not be able to do so.

The Blitter board does exactly what you would expect. It copies bytes from one section of main memory to another - including into video memory which, as mentioned, is just mapped in main memory. It's not 64KB bank bound.

Lastly we have the Audio board. It has two channels, both with 32KB of memory mapped into the Device memory bus rather than the main memory bus. Basically the device bus is for things that are / or can be slow to access. The Device bus comes with a clock stretching penalty when accessed but is perfect for things that aren't accessed often and need only a small memory map.

The Audio board is an upgrade of the one I've posted previously back when I was using '40105 FIFOs for the audio buffer. And brings me to my the only other picture I'm posting.

Each of the 'chip' boards you see on the daughter boards needs to be tested after soldering. Both for defects but also for correctness of design. I use a Raspberry Pi Pico with 64 lines of GPIO that can simulate either the full data and address buses for a daughter board or the signals I'm interested in testing on a 'chip' board.

So that's where I am. Actually building this monstrosity and hoping to have something physical out this year. Well I say that; mostly what I'm doing is writing software for it

[barnacle]

And then in the afternoon...

Neil

[AndrewP]

Oh, I forgot to mention something important (but pretty obvious from the pictures). I only want to use in production components - which is fair enough but that means I can't use old sounds and graphics chips. I forgot to say that I decided no programmable logic chips. No CPLDs and definitely no FPGAs.

I have an absolutely boatload of discrete components now, 100s of different mostly LVC chips.

barnacle wrote:

And then in the afternoon...

...I should probably label them

[plasmo]

AndrewP wrote:

Oh, I forgot to mention something important (but pretty obvious from the pictures). I only want to use in production components - which is fair enough but that means I can't use old sounds and graphics chips. I forgot to say that I decided no programmable logic chips. No CPLDs and definitely no FPGAs.

I see a number of ATF16v8, is ATF22V10 acceptable? It can save you quite a bit of logic.
Bill

[AndrewP]

plasmo wrote:

I see a number of ATF16v8, is ATF22V10 acceptable? It can save you quite a bit of logic.

Sadly no. I really decided to make my life difficult.

The ATF16V8s (good spot by the way) are all on 'debug' boards that I don't think are critical components of the computer. With that said if you look in the bottom right you'll see an ATF22V10 on the Status Board that I forgot about and still need to remove. It's not a critical board, it just shows a two digit hex number. But I don't need a '22V10 to do that, the '816 can handle it fine.

Looking to the future, if I ever actually finish this and want to build a second one then I'll dump most of the discrete ICs into either EPM7160STC100s or EPM570T100C5Ns. But for now I want to make a computer that can - at a stretch - be understood by looking at traces and ICs.

[Broti]

Happy New Year!
Since I'm not really a Hardware guy, my plans are a bit different
I hope to finish my disassembly of Space Invaders (Atari 2600) and finally get a copy of Programming the 65816 (Eyes & Lichty)

[BigDumbDinosaur]

My New Year plan is simple...stay upright with a pulse. 

My wife and I will both turn 80 this year, she in April and me in May.  She’s okay healthwise...by octogenarian standards.    As for me, and given my medical maladies of the recent past, I’m actually somewhat amazed to still be breathing.    Assuming we both make it to 80, we’re going to have a combined birthday party in May, with my jazz trio providing the entertainment.

On the 6502 front, I’m hoping to get POC V1.5 built soon.  I want to first get my CPLD test rig done so I can prove the logic for V1.5, mainly to catch any timing “gotchas.”  The GAL tester helped me discover a timing booby trap with the first version of the V1.5 design, so I’m hoping the CPLD tester will do the same with the second V1.5 rendition.

Once V1.5 is running, I have a lot of software stuff to do.  Foremost will be to finish my 816NIX filesystem implementation, and then start on a multitasking kernel.

[GlennSmith]

Happy new year to all.

The combined age of the members of this forum must be quite amazing ! Im not in the golden age bracket of BDD, but already mid 60s. We've seen so many 'wow' things come and go...

My 65(c)02 plans this year : finish the self-hosting PLASMA (no more shouting!) environment for my rp6502 system :
[ bootable VM : OK; cross-compiler/assembler : OK; self-hosting compiler/assembler compiler : 80% done, assembler 50% done]. I have officially adopted the language for ALL of my 6502 development from now-on : it's fast, it's fairly high-level (nice to read when you come back to debug) *and* it accepts in-line assembler, which is brilliant. Thanks to Dave 'resman' - who has patiently steered me through the porting process.

On the HW side I'm working on a merger of my SBC which has many forum ideas (interrupt priority mgmt, many of Garth's fast I/O tricks, Daryl's 1504 SPI chip), dedicated I2C interface and 2 6522's (one for // printer interfacing) - and a rework of the rp6502 with new decoding logic (SPLD or CPLD, depending on size). Even though the rp6502 doesn't run at breakneck speeds (PHI2 = 8MHz max), the fact that all of the video and filesystem is already taken care-of by the 'pico' managers means that ALL of the 6502's bandwidth is available for real work.

All that intermingled with work on the house, building a new workshop where, (at last), all my stuff can live (did I hear my wife say "junk" ?), and all of the usual things that are involved in retired life... Never a dull day!

Good luck and success for all of your projects, and thumbs-up to all of those hidden and not-so-hidden musicians out there!

[barnacle]

(On a gloomy note: I note that many of us are of 'a certain age' and while we might go on another thirty years, there will come a point when suddenly we stop posting... anyone else put things in place to advise fora like this that such a thing has occured?)

Neil

[GlennSmith]

barnacle wrote:

(On a gloomy note: ... anyone else put things in place to advise fora like this that such a thing has occured?)
Neil

I was wondering the other day if we couldn't try and create a few more articles on the main 6502.org page, with a synthesis of some of the more important topics/tutorials that are currently buried amongst posts... There is a wealth of information on the forum, but sometimes it's the 'outside search engines' that find stuff for me, where I've thrown in the towel with the local search tool...

I don't know if it's best to organise (sorry - 'organize') by theme, or by author.

My cents worth : I'm willing to help if wanted.

[BigEd]

GlennSmith wrote:

I was wondering the other day if we couldn't try and create a few more articles on the main 6502.org page, with a synthesis of some of the more important topics/tutorials that are currently buried amongst posts... There is a wealth of information on the forum, but sometimes it's the 'outside search engines' that find stuff for me, where I've thrown in the towel with the local search tool...

I did previously post this, in the hope of surfacing and collecting a kind of best-of-the-forum, with some success:
Mini-challenge - finding fine threads from the archives

But of course everyone has different interests and different values so there can never be a single top ten or top one hundred.