First off hello and thank you for taking the time to read my question. My name is JP and I started to dive back into digital electronics reliving my college experience from over 30 years ago.

This forum is a great place full of awesome ideas and I am enjoying this immensely. I am in the process of adding ROM to my 65C02 following Ben Eaters great videos I am trying to understand why when I set $FFFC and $FFFD to look at $8000 (or 0080) for the begin of code, my monitor shows the CPU address $1000 instead. Everything else looks good. For example I can put in my ROM start at 0x8000 and perform an a9 (LDA #) with a byte value and it will show in my monitor as a command being processed except at 1000 instead of 8000.

Any help understanding what it is doing would be great. Below is a snippet of my serial monitor. Thanks!

1111111111111111 11101010 ffff r ea
0000000100000000 11000000 0100 r c0
0000000111111111 11000000 01ff r c0
0000000111111110 11000000 01fe r c0
1111111111111100 00000000 fffc r 00
1111111111111101 10000000 fffd r 80
0001000000000000 10101001 1000 r a9
0001000000000001 01000010 1001 r 42

Generally this is a matter of an address line or two being swapped order when connected to the Arduino monitor. Can you double check that you've got all 16 lines connected in the order you specified in your monitor sketch?

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https://github.com/Individual-Solid/

(Welcome, KC2NIK! I agree - swapped address wires would do this, so check and check again.)

I did check with a continuity tester between the pins but my eyes are not what they used to be so I’ll definitely check again. Thank you for the replies.

Well as stated by the replies I did indeed have the last 4 lines on arduino flipped. Thanks for the replies to everyone!

Check , check , and check again. Admit you cannot see and check a 4th time…BINGO!

Lol

Great to hear that you found and fixed the problem!

Opinion piece:

I certainly have no issue helping folks out whenever I can but it might behoove Ben to get on here and provide some support.

It's just that it looks like he's got himself a cost free support department sometimes. He could at least chip in a bit.

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Bill

I find it odd how many people have issues with the Ben Eater stuff. I for one used the videos as lessons to remember the things I learned a long time ago as well as the first time for things I never got. While I was "re-learning" so to speak I started experimenting with the things he does in the videos. I used that as a stepping stone. I then started getting into the Garth Primer and similar where I am learning even more. I am now starting to take what I learned from all places and create my own build. I am now working out the glue logic to help with my address map thought.

To say "cost free support department" insinuates I purchased a product from Ben Eater and am having the people on this forum support the product I bought. I have not purchased any kits etc... I have tons of 74LS series chips from when I went to college over 30 years ago and I did purchase a few missing chips from Jameco as well as an arduino from Amazon.

To be clear I am not angry at the post or anything like that, I just see a few posts on the forum that show some animosity towards the Eater video's. To be honest, I just think he is very good at explaining things. I stumbled onto this forum over a post titled "Welcome Ben Eater Builders" or something like that. I have found tons of valuable information and appreciate everything I have learned here so far. I just hope one day, I can be a person who can share what I learned with others on here to return the favor so to speak.

I think it's good that there's a flow of people coming here with successes and problems with their 6502 builds - with a bit of luck, some of them will stick around, do more projects, become experts.

And here is my opinion:

Open source is great... Until you need support...

For many years, I released a lot of my code under open source licenses, GPL, etc. (nothing remotely 65xx related), and I foolishly (now, hindsight is great), put my name and email address in. Even worse I started to reply to the emails I got. I participated in forums and other online discussions, made personal appearances at various events and so on ... I was quite proud of my software - it's used all over (and off) the world.

What I didn't expect was for selfish un-printables to include my code in their products (both commercial and non-commercial), then expect me to support it because they never bothered to add in their own email address/contact details. I really didn't expect people to steal it. (ie. create a commercial product, then not publish it under the terms of the GPL but leave my contact details in.).

The GPL? Not worth the electrons it's printed with because I can't afford the legal fees to enforce it.

(And for the absence of doubt, no, this wasn't the Chinese, these were fine American and European people and companies)

After 1000 emails on one particular software package that included my libraries I automated the responses with pointers about who to get in-touch to fix their issues. After 10,000 emails I decided that enough was enough and removed my software and stopped offering free support. I will never release any of my code under an open source license ever again. I may release some source under a "source available" license (which incidentally is how I feel we ought to treat EhBASIC now) but if people want my support? Well, they can pay for it.

This may seem somewhat selfish, but I felt badly left down by that particular community - to the point it created health problems for me at the time and not one of those selfish unmentionables bothered to even pick up the phone and ask if I was OK.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software

Ben is trying to make a living my producing YouTube videos and selling kits and I have no issues with that at all. Good luck to him. If you've ever looked into how YouTube monetisation works, then you'll realise that that's hard and they're squeezing the content producers harder and harder all the time. So I don't blame him for not being here. He does run his own little forum for each project though - I suspect people can get support there.

And one day I might sell kits and videos about my 6502/65816 boards. Who knows, but if I do I'd like to think that there is a world of knowledge wealth that can help people to take the load of me, trying to make a few pounds sterling while I get on with enthusing another generation with 6502/816 retro systems. Who knows. I do know that the active people here are probably not my target audience though - I suspect Ben knows the same, but you never know. I'd have bought a Ben kit if the US to UK postage, import duties and taxes weren't stupidly high.

So, personally, I think we should support Ben's customers, but only if we can. Only if we have the time and/or energy to do so. We don't have to and we can simply ignore it. We have that choice.

-Gordon

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

And, to be clear from my perspective .. I have no issues helping out where I can. That's what this place is all about. I also wouldn't stop helping if Ben were here. I just think he should participate and be a part of the community. After all, if one starts a barrel rolling down a hill, one has to take some responsibility for what it does and where it ends up rather than relying solely on others.

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Bill

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

This conversation sort of started in the "Welcome Ben Eater Builders" thread, but it was well noted that turning that welcome thread into a criticism train was probably not a good idea. Whether or not it's a good idea in an individual project thread, well, we're already doing it. AT least it's not a general welcome.

I'm relatively new on these forums, and relatively new to digital electronics/microcomputing. I've come to the defense of the Eater "Syllabus" before, and I don't want to get the reputation as an unwavering acolyte, but I'd like to offer a few notes that may offer some perspective.

First, I'd like to take a second to look at the BOM of the kit Ben has for sale. That list, purchased with the exact part numbers from Jameco would cost $80.59. The Ben Eater kit is $84.95. I'm used to seeing electronics kits with 100% margins. a ~5% isn't very much, at all. I'm sure the margin is a little higher, with bulk sales on some components. But yes, he's selling these kits but they probably aren't the main source of his income. On the other hand, he does have a Patreon where folks get early access to videos and a chat that he actively participates in. I suspect this is a bigger form of income than the kits!

Secondarily, Ben is not a 6502 specialist. His video channel was about logic-gate based computers, then the 6502, then simple VGA, and lately has been preoccupied with keyboards and then USB in general. There's still a lot of folks working through his videos from many years ago.

Thirdly, Ben also encourages folks not in his Patreon chats to engage with the community at reddit.com/r/beneater. This group has folks on the ready to help with easily answered questions. Quite a few of us lurk and post over here too, and generally start suggesting folks connect with 6502.org once they're asking questions beyond the Ben design and have something more interesting to talk about. Ben does (very rarely) participate over there.

I'll be honest, I do admit Ben were more active in the general community too - if only so he could update a few specific videos with overlays or description notes clarifying frequent mistakes (the first question usually is swapped address lines on the monitor!) As the reddit community grows, I think we'll probably be looking for ways to publish a "BE6502 Survival Guide" that covers common mistakes. Two similar guides have been written for Ben's first 8-bit computer project, and they're constantly linked and looked back at. As I alluded to in the other thread -- if we could start listing concretely problems that newbie builders face, in a form scoped tightly to the kit build instead of with a lot of extraneous information, we (reddit, and 6502.org if folks are interested in participating) could drive folks to success more. The primer is a great guide, but being told "don't do it on breadboards" while working on a project intended to run on breadboard (and at a speed slow enough to not mater), it can be discouraging and harder to pick out the information actually relevant to you.

But I digress, as I said, I am not in the cult of Ben, I just learned a lot from those videos in particular and am excited about the idea of helping others learn more and more better from them.

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https://github.com/Individual-Solid/

So, it sounds like Ben has adopted, more or less, a 'paid support' philosophy. I guess there's nothing technically wrong with that.

reddit.com eh? First place I'd think to go for 6502 expertise and support.

Actually, I think reddit.com holds the current record for unanswered and incorrectly answered questions on any/all topics. Sometimes I wonder why people even bother with it. I guess if you find the right community there it might not be too bad, but I have never found the right community there. Conversely I have always found the best place for information on a particular subject are forums dedicated to that subject. As apparently have a lot of Ben's followers. For instance, if I want to ask a question about my Honda Ridgeline I'd go to www.ridgelineownersclub.com not reddit .. but I digress.

All 6502 acolytes are more than welcome here. So is Ben.

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Bill

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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?