Welcome to our 6502 world.

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

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

Much to my wife's annoyance I bought a BBC Micro second hand at the weekend. After 20+ years in storage a capacitor in the PSU promptly burst when it was switched on (a common BBC failure pattern) but after a quick repair its back up and running.

I also bought a NES for the kids . Two 6502 retro-machines in one week!

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Andrew Jacobs
6502 & PIC Stuff - http://www.obelisk.me.uk/
Cross-Platform 6502/65C02/65816 Macro Assembler - http://www.obelisk.me.uk/dev65/
Open Source Projects - https://github.com/andrew-jacobs

I recommend contemporary books on these subjects. Something by Rodney Zacks is a good bet. I have his 6809 book and learned loads from it. What ideas have you for your SBC? Remember, start simple and don't try to do everything at once. I started with an MPU, an EEPROM, and a latch. I was stunned when I powered on the breadboard and saw my test pattern flash across the LEDs.

Lawrence

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8 bit fun and games: https://www.aslak.net/

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

Spouses, BDD. And spare us the caricature.
Cheers
Ed

I’d like to say *HELLO* to all of you. My name is Marco, I’m 47 and I’m living in the Netherlands.

My occupation was electrician, but due to a severe illness I cannot do that work anymore. So I’m at home, and at good days I tinker with electronics, and at bad days I read about electronics.

My computer adventure began 1979, and so far I had:

Philips G7000 with VIDEOPAC 9 (among others).
1982: TI-99/4A with Extended BASIC.
1985: Commodore 64. (rather late, but it was my first real love. I bought it myself.)
1987: Commodore 128 (the most sophisticated 8-bitter I know of) ;-P
Commodore Amiga 500 for a very short time, I didn’t like it.
PC-AT 286 13MHz. Following a long line of PeeCees.
At that time I had no Commodore computer anymore, but luckily I kept all the books, cartridges, EPROM burner etc.

1996 I dove in the world of retro computing by collecting all kind of Commodore 64 stuff. 2011 I became aware of the VIC-20 and fell in love with the design and began to understand (at least a little) its inner workings.

My “lab” is equipped with:
A humble 20MHz dual ray scope from 1978 (Hameg 512).
A homemade TTL Logic Probe with buzzer.
Recently I bought a SCANALOGIC-2 EDU-KIT (http://www.ikalogic.com/scanakit/)
I have a bunch of 74HCTxxx’s and a small stock of basic electronic components. Every time I order something, I order some extra quantities, well the cheap ones at least
Regarding 65xx I have some MOS/Rockwell chips, no WDC (yet).
Recently I managed to make double sided PCB’s with satisfying results. Using EAGLE, a laser printer and a laminator with AVR controlled temperature regulation.

As a 65xx programming “toolchain” I prefer the ACME Cross-Assembler with the free available TextPad 5.4.2.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/acme-crossass/
http://www.textpad.com/download/textpad45.html
It has Syntax Highlighting and one can assemble and execute binaries on an emulator (VICE) or transfer and execute it on the real hardware at the touch of a button. For AVR tinkering I use Arduino and lately Atmel Studio 6.1. To make my first steps with CPLD I installed ISE 8.1 on an aged WinXP P4 with LPT port. I’ll build a parallel programmer with a test board for a XC9572. But I am far from designing something myself, like address decoding or a simple video device. For now I’d be happy to replicate Daryl's 65SPI!

I stumbled into this forum through the VERONICA project. Since then I’v been lurking here and a lot of my questions have been answered by reading several threads and primers.

At the moment I’m prototyping on breadboards with 1-2 MHz 65xx, which is very rewarding! I have a minimal first design going with Lee’s EhBASIC.


Eventually I’d like to build a full featured expandable SBC on which I can program and expand with I/O devices.

Regards,
Marco

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Marco

Welcome Marco, thanks for sharing the photo of your project. Be fun to hear more. Here's to more good days than bad.

Welcome. That's a very colorful breadboard you have. Quinn Dunki (Veronica) would be pleased to know that her project got you interested in trying out the 6502.

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

Welcome Marco! Always good to see a shot of a breadboard project.

Thanks for the welcome!
Well, I don’t know if I’m too happy with that picture , but I’m glad it Works.

I told her, and she is!

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Marco

Hi Marco, welcome. Glad to see somebody else with love for the VIC-20. Those were the days!

Ok, it's half a year that I joined this awesome forum. I think, it's time to introduce myself now
My name is Mario and I live in a village near Berlin, the capital of Germany. I work as a system administrator in a datacenter on a really high level (compared to the things we're discussing here) of system integration and -management, but still low enough to make our customers think I'm a "Wizard of the OS" (sorry, couldn't resist).
I'm addicted to computers since I was 9 or 10 years old. Growing up in the eastern part of Germany (former GDR) it was difficult to get my hands on a computer. I learned BASIC from books and computer magazines long before I could proof my knowledge on a real machine. Since then it was my dream to build my own system, but I was missing the knowledge and even the chance to buy the parts to get this done. So it stayed a dream for nearly 30 years. Later my parents spent a lot of money getting a used C64 and later a floppy station. Spending hours before the little black'n'white TV-set connected to my C64 ended up in wearing glasses now. But beside playing games I made my first steps in assembler. Even opcodes became important to me, because the second joystick port (used by 75% of all games) of my C64 was broken for one direction (no chance to get it repaired in the eastern part of Germany this times) and I figured out to check the game data for "AD 01 DC" and turn it to "AD 00 DC" what worked fine for about 50% of the programs, making them read port one instead of port two. After the reunion of the both parts of Germany I got an Amiga 500 and spent more time in playing games, then writing programs. Programming became important again during my study and later work, but on a high level like Java, C/C++, script languages and even such strange things like PostScript or a language called "beta"
About two years ago a colleague found the Arduino project and again I was infected by the tinkering virus, building things like a weatherstation for our house, several LED lamps, a automatic steplight for the stairs of the house for some friends. This project was the first complete PCB I created in my life (same strange wiring then my EEPROM programmer prototype) and the first project with only discrete components and a bare metal ATMega328. This was close enough to bring the dream of my own 8bit machine back to my mind and I started looking around what others had done with that idea.
That was the time I found this forum ... and the rest is history

The picture shows the current stage of my dream. A W65C02 running at 1MHz, connected to a 74HC138 used for address decoding, a 8k AT28C64 EEPROM at $E000 and two "support" chips (74HC00 and 74HC04) to be able to combine and invert signals. At the moment there's no RAM yet, so programming is a bit annoying because I have no stack, only registers, but for small tests it's ok. My little bus-sniffer showing on the photo is connected to a 74HC574 octal D-flipflop used as simple 8-bit output directly addressed by writing to the mapped address ($c000). A second 75HC574 is connected as 8-bit input, also directly addressed by reading from $a000. Later I will try to combine both ICs in a setup that needs only one address. Write goes to the output pins and read get data from the input pins. By costs of only a few cents per chip this is a real cheap method adding a lot of I/O lines to a system. I know that there a VIAs and I will add them too, but for learning how things work, this first step necessary to learn about interfering signals on a bus systems if more then one component is writing to the bus at the same time
Next step will be adding a 6532 RIOT to get some RAM to the system, making things like programming much easier. Getting I/O lines and a timer on top makes it even better.

So stay tuned for more long (sorry for that ) stories from the "old world".

Mario.

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How should I know what I think, until I hear what I've said.

Great to hear your story!

Welcome Mario & Marco. Great to have you guys with us!

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