Even on busy days at work I like to spend my spare time to check out other peoples' projects and questions on different websites.

BigEd is an expert at searching through links. I thought I would try to start a list of forum sites worth a daily check besides our own 6502.org.
He has searched out a nice forum in a recent post here that I wasn't previously familiar with.

I've also seen quite a few impressive retro sites over the years , but I feel like I may be forgetting some of them over time. So I decided to start the following list. Feel free to add any site links as a response!

Not all links have to be forums. Maybe just a blog, twitter or a personal website.

Here's my addition, but I know I'm forgetting alot.

6502.org
Andre Fachat
lemon64.org
stardot.org.uk
anyCPU.org
Xilinx.com
opencores.org
Syntiac
Retromaster
Arlet
FPGAArcade
http://lucidscience.com/
http://www.fpga4fun.com/

BigEd's:
http://easy68k.com/EASy68Kforum/
http://stardot.org.uk/forums/
http://atariage.com/forums/

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cosmacelf/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rcacosmac/
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/fignition (or http://groups.google.com/group/fignition)

BDD's:
http://www.commodore128.org

ChuckT's:
Steve Chamberlin
http://www.engadget.com/
http://arstechnica.com/
http://embedded-lab.com/
http://digital-diy.com/
https://forum.sparkfun.com/index.php
http://www.instructables.com/

Garth's:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/6502ag/
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/AppleII/
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/c64/
Rob Finch
http://bradsprojects.com/forum/index.php
http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/index.php

EDIT 8.28.2013: Added suggested sites

_________________
65Org16:https://github.com/ElEctric-EyE/verilog-6502

I'm on some Yahoo forums (fora?) that are mostly dormant recently but there's some good stuff in the archives.

• 6502: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/6502ag/ (some of our members here are on this one)
• Apple II: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/AppleII/
• Commodore 64: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/c64/
• BC CPU: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/bc_cpu/ This is Rob Finch's forum on CPU design. Rob Finch is a member here on 6502.org but seems to have mostly disappeared from the microprocessor scene. I have not been able to get hold of him. I think someone here said they knew him and had seen him recently. Rob, if you read this, we'd like to hear from you!

I mainly got on the C64 and Apple II lists to find someone who would like to take my C64 (and C128) and Apple II computers, accessories, software, and books, but I have not finished inventorying them yet to list them. I plan to put them on my website too. I think I have a full list of the C64 stuff but have not started on the Apple II stuff. I'm not really asking any money for them except I want the takers to pay for shipping and if they eBay them I'd like 10% of the proceeds. (Hopefully that would pay for much of the first batch of PC boards for my next product offering.) Local pickup would be easiest for me of course. I don't want to just throw it all out. I never really used them myself, but one of our sons used them quite a bit as a child. Today he's somewhat of a networking and Linux expert and maintains the networks and servers at a couple of grade-school campuses.

Oh, and there's also Brad's forum at http://bradsprojects.com/forum/index.php which ChuckT pointed us to, so I got on that one recently too, and there's the vintage computer forum at http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/index.php which gets a lot of traffic.

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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?

I really never understood what the fascination is with Yahoo groups folks that keep message lists like these private. I understand how you should need to sign up to post, that makes complete sense. But to read? It's crazy -- you can't google their content, you can't "stumble upon" them unexpectedly (like you can, say, 6502.org), and you can't get a taste of the community before joining.

What's the big deal about joining? It is a big deal -- it's One More Step that keeps folks out. I'm, personally, tired of registering for every other thing out there for basically no purpose whatsoever, especially for a site like Yahoo.

How many stores in the mall would you browse if you had to "sign up" just to go inside?

Crazy.

So, there's 4 forums I won't even bother to sample. Why should I? They don't seem to want to share with me, why should I return the favor?

I forgot about that. Yes, it's crazy that you should have to sign up to just read them. I also don't like the fact that I can't edit messages I already submitted if I find a typo or something confusing or if a link changes later. Another forum I'm on for Hewlett-Packard calculators, here, although it's not an email list, archives the posts every so often, then you can't reply to posts or edit your own, and if you had bookmarked something, the URL changes so you lose it, and their search function is just about worthless. (You can do a web search but it won't focus on individual posts, only whole pages.) What we have here with phpBB is waaaaaay better! Thanks Mike!

_________________
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?

Two reasons I can think of:
1) You are more likely to contribute if you want to read it bad enough because you will have to join.
2) They (Yahoo) sell your name and address and in return, you get more junk mail to throw away at your house.

I think if you want to grow this forum, some of you could buy an Apatco computer and I could actually see another 6502 or 65C816S forum forming here. The same could happen if some of you bought a Micro Kim from Briel Computers as you could add two more forums here.

As far as sites to visit every day, I can think of a few.

I personally visit Adafruit's blog and the blog at Dangerousprototypes every day. They have a bit of everything. Then I try to keep up with the electronic projects at Hackaday.

http://embedded-lab.com/
http://digital-diy.com/

If you like to build, there are projects at:

https://forum.sparkfun.com/index.php
http://www.instructables.com/

If you are looking for single board computers, there are a few with forums.

Xgamestation
Maximite
Prop Mini Computer
Raspberry Pi

And then there are single board computers from Apatco and a Micro Kim from Briel Computers.

There are homebrew projects to code on your Xbox or Nintendo Wii. Other than that, I would like to turn some ARM chips into a single board computer like the Cubieboard, or a quad core Raspberry Pi called the Odroid.

There are ARM forums from different manufacturers like T.I.'s Stellaris or the STM Discovery.

Yea, I used to frequent that (HP Calc) forum. I found (enough of) the posters rude, elitist, and hostile enough that I simply left. It was a shame, the 35s had just come back out, there was a get together scheduled in San Diego I was debating to go down an participate.

But, nope.

I simply choose to not participate in areas like that.

HMMMM... yahoo groups makes me think back to when I was designing my first PCB using PCBExpress.com service with surface mount QFP packages. Their service and software are above average IMO, but their pre-loaded QFP package templates are somewhat outdated.
Joining the yahoo group for expressPCB yielded me the layout I needed for a certain type QFP IC layout.

_________________
65Org16:https://github.com/ElEctric-EyE/verilog-6502

Did they ask for your home address? That might partly explain why those forums have so little new activity. No new blood. I think phpBB and similar forums become much more popular. I know the owner of the 6502 Yahoo forum prefers the kind where the posts are emailed out so you don't have to check a website like 6502.org. I'm sure Yahoo didn't ask for my home address when I signed up, but that was many years ago, and we only get the junk mail that all the neighbors do-- Verizon FIOS, Pennysaver, etc.. When one of our sons signed up for something--I think it was a picture service to see your friends' pictures (which has probably also gone south with the advent of facebook)--they asked the address, and he gave them the address of an empty lot a couple of miles away. For a picture, he gave them the picture of a squirrel.


I think I'll join that sparkfun one, but I don't expect to be very active on it.


There are a few of that kind on any forum except maybe the smallest ones; but for the most part, that forum is quite civil, being mostly engineers, math teachers, physics teachers, airline pilots, etc.. There are some extremely knowledgeable people there making new modules and software images for the modules for hardware dating back to 1979, and are doing an extremely impressive job at it. Then there's the 41CL where you swap out an HP-41's main PCB for this one and make your 41 50 times as fast and it has over 140 modules built in, plus a ton of RAM. I want to get the NoV-64 module which has 48K ROM and 64K RAM, and have it flashed with at least the new 41Z module image which gives the 41 a true complex 4-level stack and a ton of complex-number functions, and the Sandmath module, both of which are stunning in their capabilities. My own interest was for the 41 and 71 which could be used as instrument controllers on the workbench, and most of those men are instead into it for the math, so I ignore a lot of the topics. There are a few people on that forum who are also on this one.

_________________
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?

Yes they did. I had to delete my yahoo account because when I moved, junk mail was still coming to my old house and my dad started showing up unannounced and driving at night in his 80's to my house to give it to me even though I didn't want it and I felt that was a danger so I went to great lengths to get all the spammers to stop. Munincipalities pay for seperate paper recycling to get rid of all the trash advertisements that I can't afford nor want and my parents on their own were getting a grocery bag of recycling from the postal service every day which I think is rediculous because you are paying the munincipality to get rid of stuff normal people don't have money to buy. If I gave you a trash bag of ads every day, how many do you think you could actually answer in a day?

Yahoo was also putting bots in their chatroom to sell pornography. If you were innocently trying to be friendly with people, make friends and chat, they put an end to it by introducing undesirables. If there was an electronics or computer forum, no longer would there be true users talking about the subject because it would be a "put on" to see your credit card so they basically ran their business into the ground with me.

The other problem was trying to remove yahoo messenger from the operating system. It embedded itself in the operating system and I couldn't remove it and complaints to yahoo wouldn't remove it. Think of it as spyware.

I had to put hotmail and yahoo accounts on block from my ISP because of all the spam I was getting.

That's pretty neat. Looking at it, I guess they recreated the CPU in to an FPGA? Interesting.



Yea, my father (I think wisely) got me the 15C instead of a 41. As a computing engine and peripheral, the 41 is an amazing device. As a calculator, I think the 15C was pretty remarkable. There's something to be said for keystroke programming vs keying in alphanumeric commands.

I managed to get sucked in and bit by the 48g family. What an amazing device.

We're getting a little O.T. here, but as long as we're talking about other forums and their focuses--

It was, and it still goes for very high prices on eBay. There are a lot of people who want HP to bring back the 15c. The 41 was losing its advantage with the 15c (scientific), 16c (computer science), and 12c (financial) calculators coming out, so they made the Advantage plug-in module which took a lot of the routines written in assembly from the CCD, PPC, and other powerful modules, plus the 12c, 15c, and 16c, and improved them further. Now the 41z, Sandmath, and other modules take the 41 way beyond what it could do with the Advantage. The Advantage was kind of clumsy at complex numbers, but the 41z module makes them native, not a jurry-rig, and much faster.


[no longer O.T.] Someone here made a comment recently about keystroke programming making it easier to later get into assembly language, something I benefitted from without thinking about it in that way until they said it. I think it's true. It doesn't mean every function has to be on a key (and the 41 with modules plugged in has a bazillion functions that you either spell out, or, for the ones you use most often, assign them to a key on the USER keyboard), but rather that each line is one instruction, often with an operand, but no syntax requirements.


I have a 50g (the peak of the 48 family?) that someone gave me, and although I know it's very powerful, I know it takes a large time investment to learn to take advantage of it, and I have not put in the time. I just have the manuals that came with it which were absolutely terrible, and a huge turn-off, compared to the HP manuals of the early 1980's. I know there is a much better (and very voluminuous) manual to download, but again, I haven't taken the time. I have seen in many posts however than the user RPL language has a lot in common with Forth.

_________________
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?

http://arstechnica.com/

Arstechnia has a lot of news and history. I have seen a lot of good articles come out of it.

If you want the skinny on new devices coming out and whom you are competing against, engadget is worth a read.

http://www.engadget.com/

If you want to see news about the PC, there are several sites like Tomshardware, Cnet, Extremetech and PCMag.

FPGA4FUN is another site I forgot to mention that has a forum.

Also, Lucid Science is an excellent website, although no forum.

_________________
65Org16:https://github.com/ElEctric-EyE/verilog-6502

Hi EEye
please could you add to your list:
http://easy68k.com/EASy68Kforum/
http://stardot.org.uk/forums/
http://atariage.com/forums/

more tangentially (for other CPUs):
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cosmacelf/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rcacosmac/
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/fignition (or http://groups.google.com/group/fignition)

Cheers
Ed

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