I agree that studying more processors is good, so as not to get tunnel-visioned; but keep in mind that the 6502 out-benchmarked the Z80 and the 65816 out-benchmarked the 68000, inspite of having fewer and narrower registers, meaning that register quantity and width are not everything.

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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?

That's good advice. I have looked at other processors but not as much as the 6502. Yet...

Of course, you don't have to limit the study to old tech. There's also ARM, MIPS, and various other modern CPUs, as well as improved Z80 cores that now run single cycle at 20 MHz.

I think it would be a very useful exercise to write a reasonable amount of 6502 code in assembly language before embarking on building any kind of higher level language facility. You really need to understand how the registers are used, how the stack is used, how zero page is used, what the various addressing modes are good for. You can't get that merely by reading.

Cheers
Ed

I would like to start working on a SBC with probably a 6502, because the more I get into the 6502 the more I want to actually create a computer with one. Hope I can do it for 150 bucks... or so.

You certainly can. I just built one. The parts order from Jameco was just over $100. Most of that cost was wire wrap sockets & hardware. The chips are cheap. I followed Garth's tutorials and it worked the first time (minus a small issue with the reset circuit). Just be patient and careful. I built mine over a couple of weeks and made sure to do lots of checking both of the schematic on paper and continuity testing of the wiring before inserting the chips.

Hi Justin, if you could share your Bill of Materials - perhaps in a new post in the Newbies section, or in Hardware - that would be helpful. A BOM for a working project at known cost is a good starting point for a shopping list.
Cheers
Ed

Strangely enough, even though I wasn't trying to be economical when I designed it, POC V1.1 worked out to about 150 dollars a copy, including the PCB. I used ExpressPCB's four-layer Proto-Pro service to get the PCBs made, which at the time (spring of 2012) cost about 202 dollars per order. Four boards are made per order, so the per-board cost was $50.50. Total on all the parts, including the pricey Dallas 1511 RTC/watch-dog, was a hair over 100 dollars, including shipping. I have parts to build more copies.


Additional cost was incurred with the SCSI host adapter, but that item isn't needed to make the computer operate.



In other words, no haste resulted in no waste.

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

So well said! (I don't like to clutter the forum with frivolous pats on the back and so on, but Ed's post above bears repeating and emphasizing.)

_________________
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?

Heh, it took a bit of study. I was trying to correlate the PCB layout with the photo. "These aren't quite right" before I figured out the SCSI adapter is a daughter card plugged in on top.

Right you are—and I violated rule number 65816 in the process: don't take the MPU's buses off-board.

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

Interesting that Ed posted this—he makes a good point, by the way—because it ties into something that I experienced years ago in the world of business. Working from the bottom up gives you the total picture of how things operate and how upper level decisions affect a company's ability to offer a quality product or service. If you start in middle or upper management, your knowledge of the way things are done on the assembly line or in the warehouse will be weak and you'll make correspondingly weak decisions.

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