Time flies when you are having fun!

Vince Briel started his epic adventures with affordable 6502 systems as kit, as replicas of legendary systems like the Apple 1 and the KIM-1 about ten years ago with the Replica 1. And followed up with the MicroKIM, a true clone.
Now he is designing an OSI system!

He is celebrating this milestone with a replica 1ten, a new version of the Replica 1. Available as kit or assembled.
A very compact and usable system, I can recommend this as a first 6502 system!
Connect via USB to a PC and you can start working and coding.

Read more here http://www.brielcomputers.com/wordpress/?p=1064

"The mini USB interface is not only a power source, but has a built in USB to serial interface allowing you to have a virtual COMM port on your PC" - a good design choice!

The showstopper for me (and I would have loved to build one of those now that I've moved to another part of the world and lost access to all my existing projects) is that display output is to TV.. and when I think about it, that was the showstopper for a good part of the '70s microcomputers as well. In many countries it was apparently an attractive option to use the 'family TV' as video device for a microcomputer. But that was simply out of the question for the majority of us young Norwegians back then.. I think it was different in the UK, and maybe bedrom TVs were common in the US that early already?
All I know is that TV was not a good option. Thus the type of micros that became popular in my country in the early age was somewhat shifted compared to the US or even UK.

With the Apple I replica I'm now in the same situation.. I would love to fiddle with one in my new home-office corner, but I look around and I see no monitor with NTSC or PAL input. It's VGA or VGA, DVI and HDMI. No composite video in sight.

The Propeller chip used on the replica can output VGA, but it requires more pins than for NTCS or PAL and I suspect that there aren't enough free pins available for that - that's only a hunch though because I can't find a diagram on the site. But when Propellers have been used for similar purposes (e.g. the Propeddle) all of the pins get used quickly for all the glue logic that it handles.

-Tor

Get yourself a cheap composite to VGA.
Like this one: http://dx.com/p/av-to-vga-s-video-to-vga-converter-263960
Or to HDMI http://dx.com/p/cvbs-composite-av-s-video-to-hdmi1080p-scaler-converter-100694

That looks useful. Thanks Hans!

-Tor

As a teenager, I bought second-hand black and white televisions for £10 or so. I know I had at least two, and at least one failed. No TV in the bedroom unless you arrange it yourself!

Interesting. When I bought my Commodore 64 in 1983 I hooked it to an old Zenith B&W TV set (it had tubes) that I had laying around. That lasted for about a week, upon which I saw how much better the picture was going through a proper color monitor. I purchased the 1701 monitor and ended up giving the TV set away.

As for TV in the bedroom, most marriage counselors advise against it.

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

Any recollection how much the colour monitor cost? I would guess $300 or more. The first monitor I bought was second hand from a colleague, around 1988 - monochrome, probably £50 or so.

I don't really recall anymore, but 300 dollars sounds about right. A few months later, Commodore lowered the prices on the C-64, 1541 and the monitor. That price reduction was what crushed the competition.

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

We had one TV, and the VIC-20 lived in the living room with it. The next machine was the SX-64, so that problem kind of solved itself. I don't recall all that many families in the US in the 80s with more than one TV, though we also weren't among the more well-off.

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WFDis Interactive 6502 Disassembler
AcheronVM: A Reconfigurable 16-bit Virtual CPU for the 6502 Microprocessor

I expect that Vince will put the schematics and firmware online, once the project gets along further.

As far as I understand, the Apple I used monochrome text-only video. Judging from the pictures, the TV-out interface on the Replica 1 TEN is implemented as a full 3-pin color TV interface (I see 1K, 560R and 220R resistors next to each other). For 6-bit color VGA you would need 8 pins, but for monochrome VGA, 3 pins are enough. You just need to replace those resistors by different values and connect them to the v.sync, h.sync and RGB outputs. And you need to change the software to use VGA frequencies of course but that's trivial I'm sure. Once I receive my 1TEN, I'll probably post a monochrome VGA hack on this board or on the Briel computers forum.

By the way, I never had a TV in my bedroom either. When I was in the Netherlands, I bought a 21" / 55cm stereo TV with teletext in 1994 for about 1500 Guilders (about the equivalent of $700 I think). When I emigrated to the USA, I bought a 21" stereo TV for $300.

Recently, prices for second-hand CRT TVs and monitors have fallen: Everyone wants flat screen TVs and monitors (they're not so different anymore, that's a good thing). I bought a 13" color TV for about $25, and an old black and white 4" TV (with CVBS input!) for $10 at the Goodwill store and I use them for my Propeddle project. Ironically, the small "pocket" flat screen TV I bought from Parallax for $80 for the same purpose, works a lot worse: lots of times it won't lock on to the signal ("No Signal") unless you feed it through a modulator, and because of the crappy pixel interpolation, the picture looks so miserable that it's unusable. The old 13" CRT is my favorite hobby TV. Money well spent!

===Jac

Thanks Jac.

I can do that VGA change I believe, I have soldered resistor setups for Propeller VGA output in the past.
I also have one of those composite-->VGA converter devices on order so I should be covered. And of course I have also ordered a Replica 1 TEN. All of it should hopefully arrive when I'm home for Christmas (well, don't know how long the 1TEN will take - but I'm home for some time) and I'll bring the parts to Japan and have some fun soldering it all together.

-Tor