Introduce yourself

[BigEd]

Welcome! Not being a musician, I had to look a few things up, but I think I see your interest is in music-machine appliances and synthesisers (CV being Control Voltage) and the 6502 is a good fit for all that, and simple enough that you can design and build things yourself - things which can be completely understood.

[SpiradiscGuy]

Greetings 6502ers, if you Google the Spiradisc in my user name you will find my part in Steven Levy's book, wherein I was deep into 6502 low-level coding for game development and especially software copy protection (as we called it at the time). During that period in the late 70's and early 80's I estimate I wrote over a million lines of 6502 assembly (counted by measuring the thickness of the printouts that I carefully maintained).

I also hacked on hardware starting the early 70's, as a pre-teen, from taking Heathkit electronics courses and kit building to designing my own music synthesizers using early 16-bit ADC/DAC/DSP chips. I made lots of mods to my Apple ][s, including hacking the floppy drives to support the copy protection schemes and making latch+resistor-network sound cards on proto boards.

For a while I worked at the Byte Shop of Hayward in the mid/late 70's selling, repairing and programming a wild variety of early microprocessor-based machines and accessories. It was in 1978, at age 16, that I started my first business, calling it Bitworks.

My last work with 6502s from that period was leading a small team an Anzac Computer Equipment Corp building embedded 6502 controllers that would emulate IBM minicomputer printers, converting their coax network protocol streams to commands for making various non-IBM printers create similar output to the IBM ones.

I then moved on to working on IBM PCs, Unix, C, Macs, Silicon Graphics workstations, fractals, wavelets, and eventually getting my PhD at UC Davis in computer science [graphics/math stuff]. At one point during this period I did a gig for a startup built around Chuck Moore's Forth-centric CPU designs.

After spending a bit over a year at Los Alamos I moved to Lawrence Livermore Lab and spent almost 17 years there. I got to code on the world's largest computers at the time, and led a team building an image processing/compression/analysis pipeline for the world's largest video camera.

In 2012 I moved over to the "Don't Be Evil" giant tech company, leading a team to align and help produce worldwide 0.5m 3D from millions of giant satellite images. I retired in November 2022, and have decided to spend some time pursuing 6502 related hardware/software projects again.

I'll document my design and build progress in other threads, but I'll put all my 6502 work at https://cognigraph.com/6502. For a long, dry CV go to https://cognigraph.com/cv.

[Dr Jefyll]

Low-level 6502 coding for software copy protection sounds like fun... to me, at least (being someone who's irresistibly attracted to gnarly, off-beat challenges)!

Please don't put all your 6502 work at https://www.cognigraph.com/6502. It'll be nice if you share some of it here where we can discuss it.

-- Jeff

[BigEd]

Welcome, Mark, very good to see you here, and hope to hear more from you.

[SpiradiscGuy]

Dr Jefyll wrote:

Low-level 6502 coding for software copy protection sounds like fun... to me, at least (being someone who's irresistibly attracted to gnarly, off-beat challenges)!

Please don't put all your 6502 work at https://www.cognigraph.com/6502. It'll be nice if you share some of it here where we can discuss it.

-- Jeff

On Spiradisc specifically there are some wonderful deconstructions of the method on the web, including some cool visualizations of what the patterns look like on the disc surface. I'm pretty sure at this point it is safe for me to talk about the ideas if anyone is interested (deeply nerdy Apple ][ stuff).

As for where to put stuff, I will post anything 6502 related work here on the forums or project pages as well, and maybe on GitHub or a shared Google Drive folder as appropriate.

[BigEd]

Feel free to start new threads as needed - if you have any doubt, just prefix OT to mark the thread as not especially 6502 related!

[Roby]

Hello,

Nostalgia drives me back towards my early contact to computers and programming, had a VIC20 1982, and now i am considering building some 6502 based SBC. During my research on internet I came across this forum and found a lot of interesting topics. Thanks to you all for sharing this information.
I will post here when I get further in the making or (more probably) stuck somewhere on this road.

Cheers

Roby

[BigEd]

Welcome!

[BigDumbDinosaur]

Roby wrote:

Hello...

Glad to have you aboard.

Quote:

Nostalgia drives me back towards my early contact to computers and programming...

If nostalgia were involved for me, I’d have a 1971-vintage MAI Basic Four mini set up next to my office, which is on the lower level of my house.  Not sure how thrilled my wife would be with that contraption taking up all the available space.    Back then, “mini” was a relative thing.

Anyhow, the 6502 is a fun gadget, although since I got into the hobby, I’ve been working with the 65C816.  Either way, it beats watching TV.  :D

[Broti]

Hi everyone,
just joined after reading here for a while.
I'm more of a software guy (C64, Atari 2600) so expect any hardware work from me

I mostly learnt 6502 assembly around 2015(-ish ?) with 3 German copies of Rodnay Zaks' books ("6502 Games" wasn't released here) and the assembly guide from the German C64 magazine Input 64.
But my personal hero is Jim Butterfield.

Cheers
Michael / Broti

[BigDumbDinosaur]

Broti wrote:

just joined after reading here for a while.

Welcome aboard!

[anomie]

I'm anomie (sometimes anomie-p, depending on whether or not someone managed to register anomie before I did and/or how I felt about which one I wanted when I was registering)

I knew from a very young age that I wanted to program computers, but my family had little means. There was a day I woke up before school and there was a box of stuff that had a commodore 64 in it, but that C64 was part of a conditional trade (the people making the trade wanted to make sure the thing they traded for would actually work for them), and by the time I got back from school that day the trade had been undone and I was a very disappointed kid (although I was told that could happen when I saw the box). So while I'm the right age to have had and played with a C64 while growing up, I never actually owned one.

So I'd grab whatever time I could on Apple II's at school, sometimes doing things like printing out the basic source for a game that was written in BASIC, getting a book on BASIC out of the library, and taking that home and hand-writing a save game editor with pencil & paper over a weekend, then typing it in/debugging when I could get time on the computer at school.

I didn't actually have a computer at home until just after I graduated high school, a few guys got together and built a 286 out of their old-hardware collections (which I will forever and always appreciate). That came with a copy of QuickC & MASM and I just grabbed that and started running in the summer/winter between graduating and leaving for basic training. Once I was in the service and could swing it I bought a 486 and would write code in the barracks while off duty, eventually putting Linux on it, and by the time my four years were up it was 1998, I got out of the Air Force, and I managed to get a job as a "Webmaster" at a very small ISP. That pretty quickly turned into my being the network & systems admin for the company that hired me, and when the dot-com crash came that turned into me finding a new sysadmin job, roughly once a year or so. Starting around 2002 I ended up being hired to write Java code for a living and whatever not-Java code I felt like at home for fun. That's how things have been since.

In 2010 I was the first to solve a little real-life/online puzzle thing that required using VICE and I ended up disassembing it w/ VICE's monitor; since then I'd play around with VICE whenever I felt like it and dabbled at 6502 machine code. Fairly recently I started going to a local meetup, and someone there had an Utimate 64, and I ended up getting a thec64 and thinking about what might have been had that conditional trade gone through (better than trying to buy a Ferrari at midlife, eh?). That led to binge watching whatever I could find about the 6502 on youtube; which led to Ben Eater's videos, which led me here to lurk and read the primer - and about a month ago I decided something roughly along the lines of "What the hell, let's get the Ben Eater 6502 & serial kit, but I want to do some things slightly differently and I don't want to wire things up by following these videos by rote, and I'll use it to have a reason to play with kicad and hopefully manage to eventually build it - or something like it - out on a PCB".

So now, I'm here, with my previous electronics experience being roughly along the lines of "that one single-semester class in high school plus whatever kits I bought and soldered together between then and now", asking possibly dumb questions.

Hi!

[BigEd]

Excellent intro!

[BobKay]

Although I'm new to this forum, I've been around a while. My first system was a homebrew built around 1978 or so based on the COSMAC Elf from the August 1976 Popular Electronics article. My next machine was a TRS-80 Model 1 which eventually included 38KB, the expansion interface, and three floppy drives. I went through a fair number of turnkey machines which I wont bore everybody here with. Eventually both the Cosmac and the TRS-80 disappeared after several moves etc.

More recently I discovered Lee Hart's 1802-based Membership Card, which inspired an interest in retrocomputing. I have since then built a number of machines, from another homebrew 1802 through a fair assortment of Z80 machines, RC2014 etc.

Although I've owned both an Apple IIe and a Commodore 128D, I never got really involved with the 6502 itself. Recently I decided to rectify that, going through the Ben Eater videos, building an RC6502, a Kim-UNO, a uk101 simulator, and a Ben Eaterish SBC (github.com/tebl/BE6502-Build-a-65c02-computer). Yes I tend to go off the deep end on things.

Professionally I've been a field engineer, technician, and software engineer. I've worked on the hardware and software of mainframes, minicomputers, and microcomputers and I'm now retired.

[BigDumbDinosaur]

BobKay wrote:

Although I'm new to this forum, I've been around a while...

Welcome aboard!