20 years ago, on Fri 30 Aug 2002, the 6502 Forum migrated from Delphi Forums to forum.6502.org. Within 24 hours, the first eight accounts were created. Within the first year, 125 people joined. Since then, forum.6502.org has often grown more than 5% per year (by accounts and messages) and it approaches 4000 users, 7500 discussions and 100000 messages. Unfortunately, our long suffering administrators have also deleted a proportionate increase in spam. If you've never seen spam on the 6502 Forum, that is due to the unpaid and often thankless work that you don't see.
For quite a while, we've had accounts which are older than members. This will become increasingly common as people continue to discover the fun and frustration of 8 bit computing. Arguably, the 6502 Forum didn't get going in the form that we know until BigEd joined in Dec 2008, BigDumbDinosaur joined in May 2009 and Dr Jefyll joined in Dec 2009. Incidentally, BigEd is approaching the 10000th message; many of which have been a
futile attempt to cat herd the deviously creative minds of assembly programmers and budget electronic hobbyists. That's more than two messages per day over more than 13 years. GARTHWILSON is no slouch either with more than one message per day over 20 years. I jokingly described this to a newbie as "
occasionally posts on the 6502 Forum."
Sheep20 suggested that I should create a daft image for the 20th anniversary. I thought that it would be much more appropriate to design a circuit board which
divides pulses by 2^26 in the highly not recommended daisy-chain configuration and displays the values 0-20 in binary. If you prefer, it should be possible to display 0-19 or 1-20. The upper limit is partially determined with one NAND gate in a manner similar to many video circuits described on the 6502 Forum. Furthermore, this leaves a sufficient number of NAND gates to implement GARTHWILSON's preferred address decode scheme.
I designed the 100mm diameter board with many other doohickeys with the intention that boards manufactured in multiples can be used for unrelated purposes. This is very much in the spirit of the Radio Shack X-in-1 electronic experiment kits where X was 15, 50, 150, 160, 200 and probably other values - although, sadly, without the child safe spring terminals. I've included
idiot proof indicator lights, LED matrix, H-bridge, inductive loop and capacitive touch panel. The KiCAD 5.x files contain my idiot proofed power connector footprint and my suggested configuration for oscillator which should work with
2 pin ceramic resonator, 3 pin ceramic resonator, 0.1 inch crystal, 0.2 inch crystal or the two most popular sizes of can oscillator.
For maximum comedy value, I don't include a screen-shot.