Hey guys
It all started with the Sym-1, that got me hooked and I learnt the basics with that. Eventually I was able to get a terminal and it became more comfortable to program. A year later the Ohio Superboard came out and I had to have one, it had tv output and built-in keyboard. That became my main system. In the meantime work-wise I got a job programming 6802 based industrial controller-cards.
In the early 80's I found a book "6502 Systems Programming" by Thomas Windeknecht. Apart from the programming info it had an assembler called Brevity. I quickly adapted it so that it worked on the Superboard and it was heaven, until then I had been hand assembling. I had tried some assemblers but never really took to them, Brevity was/is brilliant, it turned my Superboard into a development system.
Then in '85 I returned to England, the beginning of the end, computer-wise, I had a Spectrum128 for a while until the Atari 520ST and Amiga 500 then I was seduced by the PC. It pretty well stopped my programming. Life went on and on.
Until last year, I discovered the Arduino and it got me back into both hardware and software, easy to use and great fun. And then it happened in February, I saw Quinn's blog about building Veronica. Very inspirational and I got the urge to build a system.
Being a bit of a pack-rat, I still have a load of chips from the '80s - 6502, 6502A, 65C02, 6532, 6522, 6545, 6845, 6850 plus 68xx and Z80 family chips, I've even got some 8255s. I also still have most of the books and data books like the 1983 Synertek Data book.
So, what am I doing now? Well, I've built the Meeprommer and I'm bread-boarding a 6502 based system as I would really like to get back to Brevity. Though I have 2716, 2732 and 6116, I will be using 62256 and28256 purely because of their size. In the mean-time, I'm also looking for an assembler that has output compatible with the Meeprommer. I'm also "revising" on 6502 MC as it has been over 30 years since the last time I used it...