I'm close to sending off my PCB.

Next, I will be looking for a good enclosure to put it in. I've seen some big metal boxes that are blue and remind me of the Altair. So I may use something like that.

However, I don't want to go as far as the full front panel where you have to flip switches to enter boot strap code. Those are awesome in their own right, just not where I want to go at the moment.

But I was thinking of putting at least six 7-segment LCD digits so that I could see an address and data at once.

And, of course, some blinkly lights connected to a VIA.

Any other suggestions?

My computer is general purpose and very much based on the SBC 2.5 from Daryl Rictor. However, I plan on making the expansion bus in the back via some DB25/DB9 headers. Which may seem strange.

Of course, less is more so I'm not going to make it too crowded but I'm always looking for those cool ideas I may miss.

Thanks!

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Cat; the other white meat.

You might want to use some til311 hexadecimal displays for the address and data bus displays. They're an obsolete part, but you can purchase new old stock and used system pulls on eBay for about $5 each. That sounds a bit steep compared to a seven segment display, but they don't need external drive circuits, and if I recall correctly they don't need current limiting resistors.

That's a very good idea. I've seen those before and they scream retro.

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Cat; the other white meat.

I always thought that the Heathkits had a nice sleek look. They only had room for 16 keys, so entering hex instead of octal might require some contortions unless you could increase the key count to about 20 or so.



Mike B.

I remember when they were in the catalogs. There was kind of an exciting mystery surrounding them even though I was not interested in computers yet. (I got the Heathkit catalogs for the amateur radio and test equipment.)

What you could do about the keypad situation is use at least one key as a shift key, so there would be for example 0-9 unshifted, then A-F could be shifted 0-5 (like 10-15 in decimal), and you have other keys for more functions, including the shifted 6-9. If the need were even greater, you could have more than one shift key, like PCs have <Shift>, <Ctrl>, and <Alt>. My HP-71B hand-held computer has a gold shift and a blue shift, plus a USER key to activate and de-activate the user keyboard assignments. (You can also have user keyboard assignment files to swap in and out.) My HP-41cx calculator has gold shift, USER, and ALPHA. Various modules have their own keypad overlays for their special functions. It's a way to have lots of virtual keyboards in spite of the mechanical limitations.

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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?

Now surely you should have 0-7 and shift those to get 8-F !
(My phone number sits within the octal range...)

I love the look of those Heathkit's. I've always wanted some of those but could never afford them.

Thanks for the suggestions!

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Cat; the other white meat.

Bah! My phone number ends in 6502, no kidding.

(incidentally it does fall within the octal range as well)

Whatever. We're not envious.

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

I'm thinking of moving to the north end of town so my street address is 6502.

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

I live at W255 (it's not only my address, it's a geographical ordinate). If you go one block west, you wrap around to downtown Milwaukee. Or you have to carry.