Just remember that you CAN take too much vitamin D. Natural sunlight, if available, and if you have the time, is great for topping up vitamin D levels.

'kay everyone, there have now been 15 posts since the last introduction. That's not what this topic is for. If someone new wanted to read through the "Introduce yourself" topic to "meet" everyone, or even search for the intros of key members, they wouldn't, because the topic is cluttered with pats on the back and other discussion. We're out to 21 pages now. As one who has studied health hundreds of hours (and possibly close to 1,000 hours) over the last year for a health problem I'm getting the upper hand on, I have plenty to say about it; but this is not the place.

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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?

Hello everyone!

I've been fascinated by the early 8/16 bit CPUs for years, and am in the process of writing an emulator for the 65816. Also I don't know what else to put in these introduction posts...

(I'm also breaking the 15 post streak of non-introductions)

Welcome! Good material for an introduction is how you got started, how you got back into 6502, what machine you first used, how you learned programming (or soldering) and so on. A little biography like when and where you grew up, or how you spend your days, could add colour, but it's all up to you.

I encourage everyone to take a look through previous introductions too. See also the thread "Why do we do this?"

Hi there,

My name is Nejat and I'm from Turkey, born in 1976. My first contact with computers was with arcade games. I can't remember exactly but it was I guess it was a space invaders type game in a fair. This was I guess when I was 14 years old or so. Since I can't afford a computer I only played games in arcades. Along with arcade machines there existed c64 and amiga computers put into cheap arcade use via time limiter circuits.

My first computer was a c64c which I bought when I was 17 years old. I was already familiar with programming since every month I got Science and Technique magazine (Bilim Teknik dergisi in Turkish) which published articles for Prolog, Basic listings and so on.

I got into basic and later into 6502 assembly. I studied computer engineering and currently work in a software company.

My interest into electric/electronic circuits was a natural one since I got an older brother who was studying in Electrics high school. (don't know how it's named in English) He liked to take apart nearly everything electronic at our home to inspect how it's working and so on

I always failed at analog electronics (except simulating circuits in p-spice) and circuit theory in school but I was very good at programming and digital side of the electronics.

I wanted to employ that knowledge recently in hobby electronics department and now working on some free time projects at home using Pics / Arduino dev. boards and so on.

Here are some projects I currently work on,

Hardware psid player

Initial test version without a controller. All sids use $1000 address, There are 8 sids in 8 4k pages of the 27C512 eprom.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shy9O0qigQ4

Initial design. Pic drives the address bus using counters and shares databus with 6502. It looks like a mess and indeed a very bad design.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUYjcpNh58M

Different design eliminating the connection of Pic's address bus and data bus connections. Pic transfer data to the memory using Chuck Peddle's special pin S.O. pin. To make it asynchronous I also used IRQ and NMI interrupts to transfer 1 and 0 respectively and using S.O. for flow control. Unfortunately this circuit employs swinsid since my 8580 had died in interim versions of the circuit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2a2mD4njS84

Move to arduino and more stuff like tft lcd and sd card support.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBIUJIpaeXw

Multiplexed inputs using 74hc195 for a single arduino pro micro. I want to integrate this stuff into my arcade cabinet supporting >32 buttons and son.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-p_9mXEEVyw

I was also very active in Nintendo wii scene during 2008-2012 and gone by the handle WiiCrazy.

That's all about it I guess

Welcome to our 6502 world. There's a lot here to see, so don't be bashful!

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

Hi all.

I'm magetoo on the Internet and this is me preemptively posting in this topic so you don't have to annoy me about it later.

Came to know about the 6502 in a way similar to many others in my generation, by having a C64 as my first computer. Many hours was spent in the machine code monitor of my utility cart of choice (TFC3) trying to do the usual beginner stuff, and later I managed to get reasonably fluent in 6502 assembly.

Now, many years later, all those things that seemed like black magic - electronics, algorithms, what's actually inside a CPU - have become more understandable, or even obvious, and so the idea of building something from scratch and putting theory into practice seems like the logical next step. So here I am.

(I've been lurking for a while though.)


And I do supplement my diet with extra vitamin D during winters. :-)

Hello,

I'm Marc, I live in France ; it's my first post here, a good opportunity to introduce myself.

As a kid I always wanted to know the workings of whatever technical object I could put my hands on : first, mechanical devices (clocks...) then electrical ones, on to electronics which I began to fiddle with long before I would really learn it at school.

Besides all that, a special event triggered what was to become a life's passion : when I was 10, at a store I saw for the first time an electronic calculator, an LED 4-banger. That was science-fiction turned into reality ! Soon I got mine : it was my father's, which the cat had thrown on the floor, partially damaging the display. One of the Digitron's filaments broke. The machine still worked but with a very dim display, how many hours I spent with it !

I quickly discovered scientific and programmable machines -heaven doors opened TI-57, TI-58, HPs and so on... until I could practice assembly language all day long : it was my first job, in a small company entirely devoted to real-time processing on Intel and Zilog 8-bit processors, later 16-bit ones. Many high-level languages followed on, but the assembly remained king to me.

What about calculators, may you ask ? 30 years ago I began collecting then. Pocket / desktop electronic ones (not to mention computers -even a VAX 11-750 CPU !) on to mechanical ones. Logically I ended collecting slide rules which I hadn't the opportunity to learn at school. (I also collect old radios, phones and lab/scientific equipment)

What about the 6502, do you ask ? Eh eh... I got into 6502 programming soon after I began to work, when a colleague sold me his Commodore 64. I was used to the Z-80 and at first it was difficult for me to get accustomed to so different a philosophy. But with years passing on, and complexity ever growing to those 21st century monsters (Core i7...) I found very refreshing to go to the roots and to the simplicity. Being able to control every changing bit is exciting !

Now, the puzzle is almost complete : I've always wanted to build and program my own calculator. I discovered that the 6502 is probably the best documented processor on the web (a huge tribute to all of you), so it clearly was the best choice. I built my first 65C02-based SBC with the help of Garth Wilson's site. To my amazement, my board successfully passed each hardware / software test without any problem ! I was delighted. (more on that soon, in a "hardware" post)

Lee Davison's EhBASIC soon ran happily, my board proved reliable after running tests for 3 months. Now it was time for the calculator ! Around C.R. Bond's floating-point package which I extended, I finally built a RPN scientific and programmable machine, which runs fine. 1000 registers, 23,500 program steps -and it's fast. It only needs a nice cabinet and a custom keyboard.

Well, I suppose I said enough for a first time

Thank you for reading, and see you soon on the "hardware" section, I'll have a few questions !

Regards,
Marc

Welcome! From slide rules to a VAX - that's quite a calculator collection!

Reading a computer history book recently, it suggested there were originally two tribes of microprocessor enthusiasts: those who came from calculators and those who came from minicomputer experience. They had slightly different ideas of what the microprocessor might be useful for. (I think I'm in the calculator tribe.)

Hi BigEd, thank you very much for your welcome !

The history of computing is one of my favorite readings, I also enjoy gathering and studying patents. From a tribe point of view, even if I clearly belong to the "calculator" one, big machines fascinate me as much as the little ones : I wish I had a Cray-1 in my collection ! More reasonably, I hope some day I'll be able to do a museum tour to see Crays, and Babbage's machines, and Zuse's... and so on. (not to mention cryptographic equipment )

Regards,
Marc

I like the big machines too! If you visit London some day, there are good computer exhibits in the Science Museum including a Difference Engine (and a BESM), and then Bletchley Park is only an hour on the train, where you'll find The National Museum of Computing with a couple of Crays (beware limited opening hours.) But for Zuse's machines, you may need to travel to the HNF at Paderborn - that's something I haven't done yet. (In the US, the CHM would be the place to go.)

Thank you once again, BigEd, you proved me that my "to visit" list of museums is almost complete. Of course I already did it the "virtual way", and thanks to the Bletchley Park shop, I got a full set of books which provided me much fun and learning. I just have to finish A. Hodges' Turing biography

Garth is right (top of page) I was thinking of reading through everyone, but its a bit overwhelming at the moment. I see the names of the frequent posters and that is good. I have only been crawling around this website for about 3 weeks, but I am already too comfortable with dropping my daily thoughts here (for later retrieval when I've gone senile?). So, this page is for introduction.

I obtained a B.S. degree in Marine Biology from the University of Rhode Island in August of 2002. Whilst obtaining said education, one of my professors loaned me a book by Daniel Dennett, called "Darwin's Dangerous Idea". I spent two years at school, and about three more after college trying to decipher the areas of intersection of linguistics, computers, biology, and philosophy.

Previous to 1998, my computer experience was a no-printer 486, barely-internet-capable desktop from 1995, and before that, some school use, in the fourth grade with the commodore 64. I guess most computing was done on video games machines, and none of it contributed to my learning. After college, I was looking through the basement and found my dad's old books from New England Tech. He had two 6502 books (Zaks, and DeJong); I was disturbed that, all throughout our childhood, he could program nintendo/atari games and never told us kids!

After studying some books on LISP, a friend recommended assembly language programming and the pdf-book "art of assembly". I still remember his martian "finger-counting" metaphor--describing base-16--and though I lost the pdf for a couple years, I have just tracked down another copy!

And so, as a young biologist, in a tech obsessed culture, with philosophical inclinations of my own, I decided that I should roll up my sleeves and see what this "magical hardware" really does. I got some logic chips, a radio shack book, some 74xx chips, and tried to breadboard an ALU 74181 CPU using 20 or so chips (Forrest Mimms design).

It didn't work, and I put things aside for awhile, while I studied some other scientific subjects that are of particular importance to me. After working in a semiconductor chip manufacturing facility for about six months, I had bought a few glass mirror blanks and started grinding a Newtonian reflector (telescope). I also made efforts to learn the ins and outs of lens grinding and lens design. Is study a lot of history of science; optics and biology, mostly.

I also, from an earlier job, purchased James Janesick's "Scientific Charge Coupled Devices", and after leaving the semi-plant, I began to read an understand these devices (even as the CMOS technology was encroaching on their "territory"). Several years passed, and I cobbled together the funds to buy some image sensors (CMOS VGA was all I could afford) with the intention of building a unique sort of camera (i.e. focal plane array), but I think lack of funds and lack of understanding of I^2C bus/port structure foiled my plans. Also, I didn't even own an oscilloscope (my handheld oscilloscope was surplus and stopped working after a night in my car trunk in the -20 VT winter).

At some point I remembered the old 6502 book and decided to look it up on the internet. I found the WDC website and saw they were cheap, so I bought one. I read some of the pdf datasheet, but never went any further with the plan (circa 2008-2010)

So, I have only done a few successful hardware projects, as surface mount devices--and lack of finances--usually defeat me. I have done a Nitinol, muscle wire project, and that was successful. Shape Memory alloys are pretty neat!

So, bored, intelligent, broke, and rotting away in my podunk hometown, I decided to go on the local talk radio, and become a liberal "pain-in-the-butt". Then I ran for Congress (search youtube for VT House of Reps. 2014). Then, after losing, I went back on the radio for a year, and despite educating the public, every Friday night, about the wonders of history and science, I have found this to be an unfulfilling task (though, perhaps, arguably, it was a public service.). So, here I am, trying to fill my time with useful tasks, and this computer project seemed like a good idea. Thanks for your patience!

Hi my name is Aydan my friend taught me how to flash an LED on and off realy fast on a basic Stamp i have never programmed a 6502 before. I am ten years old. I'm learning about logic gates and 74xx TTL chips. My friend is makeing his first 6502 computer and im going to help. right now im learning about the memmary map and RAM ROM I/O decoding. my friend is trying to trick kids into learning how to code he is making a parody of monoply called TechNopoly . I'm gonna Help him beta test it. I'm gonna learn machine language 10101001001111000101010101010100111001010110101

Nice to have you with us, Aydan. If you & your friend need info or advice we'll be glad to help.
A worthy effort. But it reminds me of a humorous observation I read somewhere.

"There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary arithmetic, and those who don't!"

Welcome to the forum!
-- Jeff

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In 1988 my 65C02 got six new registers and 44 new full-speed instructions!
https://laughtonelectronics.com/Arcana/ ... mmary.html