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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?

Very good - thanks for linking!

There are some more (transcripted) snippets from Steve Furber here:
Some interesting Steve Furber observations

I think I posted this the in the past, but when I as vaguely interested in the Commander-X16 project I did a video to compare BBC Basic with MS Basic (Although I used EhBASIC as it's essentially an "MS BASIC", although I did subsequently get commodore Basic 2.0 going on my system)

The TL;DR bit is that BBC Basic is broadly-speaking double the speed of MS Basic on the same hardware, it supports true integer variables (32-bit), built-in assembler, some nods towards structured programming (if/then/else, repeat until, named procedures & functions with local variables and recursion)

This was in 1981 so a good 4 or 5 years of 6502 use had passed, so it was easy to see where improvements could be made.

The networking - Econet - To have a lab of BBC Micros with networking far superior to that provided by the University central compute department and their Prime minicomputers was nothing short of amazing. I used it to network up a flexible manufacturing project I was working on at the uni. I lad Lathes, mills, robots, etc. all connected together with home-made 6502 SBCs to do the IO work and BBC Micros (coded in BCPL) to dispatch high-level commands to the SBCs and schedule jobs to the CNC machines via Econet.

The Beeb is still going strong. There are at least 2 museums with fully working "80's classrooms" fitted out with them and 1000s still in the hands of enthusiasts who are still developing software and hardware on them with regular meet-ups. Even today, the Tube (2nd processor interface) has proved to be a good tool for people developing their own CPU too, as the Beeb gives them a ready-made host system with screen/keyboard/storage, etc... The first ARM processor was developed as a 2nd processor for the Beeb (and the instruction set emulated/tested with a BBC Basic program)

The BBC Micro has heavily influenced my Ruby project, even though my first 6502 system was the Apple II - Ruby was initially Apple-like in terms of software but I really wanted my BBC Basic at the end of the day.

Enough nostalgia - although I could witter on for days

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ci_70naIg_Q

Cheers,

-Gordon

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

Sounds like fun! By what means did the Beebs talk to the SBC's?

-- Jeff

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In 1988 my 65C02 got six new registers and 44 new full-speed instructions!
https://laughtonelectronics.com/Arcana/ ... mmary.html

The SBCs were very simple - 6502, 6532 (RIOT) and a 2K uvEPROM. (Might have been 4K, it had a lot to do including reading a bar code off pallets) The RIOT's 128 bytes of RAM was mapped basically all over the bottom 32K, the RIOT at 32K and the ROM in the top 2K. (I think) So 128 bytes for stack and zero page. It was not a particularly complex design.

The SBC talked to the Beeb via a software bit-banged serial at 1200 baud. The rest of the IO went via opto isolators to the drivers for the pneumatics and inputs from the micro switches which was all wired up at 24v.

Hindsight told us that we should have dumped the SBCs and designed an IO card for the Beeb, but the Beeb was actually plan C by that point...

Cheers,

-Gordon

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

Cool! -- thanks for that.

On the topic of separate, local processors that manage local minutia and thus offload the Master CPU, I'm reminded of certain microcontrollers that feature an on-chip parallel interface which can be made to appear as a peripheral to a host system, giving one or more shared registers through which the two processors can exchange messages (somewhat similar to the BBC Tube interface).

Some PIC microcontrollers offer this facility I think, as do certain members of the Intel MCS48 family which I recently mentioned elsewhere. But the W65C265S apparently does, too! IMO this is a feature that deserves more recognition. From the datasheet:

1.10 The Parallel Interface Bus (PIB)
The Parallel Interface Bus (PIB) is used to communicate instructions and data to and from task oriented
processors, smart peripherals, co-processors, and parallel processors.
Register 3 may have a primary role of communicating commands or opcodes between processors.
Register 7 may have a primary role of communicating data or addresses between processors

And the W65C134S has some connectivity of a different nature:

1.11 The Serial Interface Bus (SIB) The Serial Interface Bus (SIB) is configured as a token passing Local Area Network, and is intended for inter-chip communications in parallel processing applications. The Serial Interface Bus has four pins associated with its use: CHIN CHOUT, SDAT, and SCLK (see Section 2.19 for more information). The SIB has seven (7) registers associated with its use: STATE, SR0, SR1, SR2, SR3, SCSR, and BAR.

-- Jeff

_________________
In 1988 my 65C02 got six new registers and 44 new full-speed instructions!
https://laughtonelectronics.com/Arcana/ ... mmary.html