I've been digging through bins of older electronics in my parents basement where all the obsolete bits go to die, before they transition to the afterlife of an eventual sendoff to an electronics recycler. I've found soundblaster cards, an unreasonable amount of Firewire cards for some ungodly reason, data storage devices I can't identify, etc.

Has there been an effort to compile a list of commonly used IC's or components from oft discarded hardware that are useful for projects in the 6502 family?

For example, I found an old WinTV capture card with svideo, composite video, an RF modulator and a dense smattering of oscillators and IC's, some of which I am sure could be repurposed for creating some form of video adapter.

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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?

For some purposes, scavenging PALs and GALs might be useful. I have to say, I have difficulty throwing anything out.

If you're getting into desoldering, there are some connectors which might be worth keeping. I have a board with some SIMM sockets on which I thought might be useful one day.

Before I got into all this madness I was making circuits with copper tape and SMT. I have a SMT rework heatgun and mild to modest experience using it to remove and transplant IC's. My background is decidedly hodgepodge. I guess I just look at something like this winTV capture card and see SDRAM, audio ADC, crystals in just about every frequency thats useful for audio and video, some super crazy video I/O chip that manages to make it sound like a spaceship that can travel to 4th dimensions in the datasheet (a bit of oversell) etc and my heatgun finger gets itchy. But, at the end of the day, even though this board is from 2005, its still sporting some really hefty tech compared to what would normally be bumping uglies with a 6502... I guess I need to control my excitement.

More specifically to the topic however, would be more modern IC's that are commonly found in discarded tech in thriftshops. I guess I'm not really getting my intent of this across the best, but one feeling I get wading into this Olympic sized pool as a newbie is 'but there has to be a whole bunch of chips out there I can pull and use to streamline aspects of these builds'. Like, 'these soundcards had x IC on them so look out for this type of soundcard or toy' or 'check boards for this IC that is commonly used for decoding or whatever'. It just feels like there is a big blindspot in translation from newbies to the wisened masters in regards to widely applicable chips that are taken for granted perhaps but newbies overlook or don't know about? Hopefully this makes sense.

If you find any Rockwell modem cards of the right age they will have som useful chips on them. Mostly this will be ISA bus aged cards. There is often EPROM or Flash, a good sized static RAM, and 6502 based microcontroller in a PLCC package.

I think the idea of repurpose, reverse-engineering, or salvage commercial 65xx products is very interesting. I've done several such projects with 68K and Z80, but none with 65xx. A scavenger list of used & cheap 65xx-based commercial products that can be bought off eBay would be nice, so would a few projects focus on tear-down of such products.
Bill

I wrote a reply but it vanished or ended up on some other thread I was digging through some cards and found a PROMISE technology Ultra 66 PCI IDE card with a Atmel AT49F001T-12PC 1MB flash on it. Interestingly, they used the model that has lockout but can be reset with 12V unlike the NT that cant. Score for me I guess!

Also found an old NVIDIA graphics card with SMT LVX245 and LVX00 and a SST 39vf512. Its strange how just a few months ago looking at a circuit board was like a parakeet looking at a printing press but now it's like I can see the Matrix

(I think almost any DIP chip would be of interest to someone!)

GALs, PEELs, and PALCE are useful as they can be erased/reprogrammed.

PALs unfortunately are fuse programmable. Once they are programmed they are pretty much useless for any other circuit unless you can use that exact programming.

I try to keep odd connectors off boards too. You never know when you'll need one to do a repair or a build and they don't take up much room.