I was thinking recently about the first pocket computer I saw, a Radio Shack PC-1 or PC-2. The father of a friend of mine ran a machine shop and he used to calculate 'missing' dimensions on blue prints he received. (He had various programs set up with the needed trig functions, etc.) I had a PC-6 when I was a senior in high school. I saved up and spent a whopping $120 on it and loved it but was disappointed by the 'assembly' programming which was really some silly interpreted mess (the built in BASIC was better.)

I think the first could of Radio Shack models actually had 4-bit CPUs and the later had 8-bit Z80 variants. That got me to wondering if there were any 6502 based pocket computers that had been produced. It likely would not have been until the CMOS version was released (I'm guessing) so that the power requirements were low enough.

I tried asking lord Google but he had no clear reply.

How big is your pocket?

https://plus.google.com/108984290462000 ... udVcSWF6tE

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Got a kilobyte lying fallow in your 65xx's memory map? Sprinkle some VTL02C on it and see how it grows on you!

Mike B. (about me) (learning how to github)

Thanks! There were some links to other similar devices too including one by Commodore. Time for me to do some more indepth reading...

Some of the Hewlett-Packard calculators used the '02. I don't remember which ones. I still use my HP-41cx every day, which is no stretch to be called a computer, but it has the Nut processor, a very strange processor with 56-bit (7-byte) registers, bit-serial data bus, 10-bit machine-language instructions, and other oddities. I have used the 41cx to control a lot of instrumentation on the workbench plus printer and mass storage all at once, and it has a file system, text editor, you can program in it assembly, its user language has boolean functions (at least with some of the 300+ available modules), etc.. The calcs with the '02 were more limited, but not because of the '02, but instead because of management decisions.

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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?

The HP-35s is one.

I had a PB-2000C at one point, which I don't think had a 6502, but was fun to program in C rather than BASIC.

I did some reading on the HP 35S and HP says they thought it was 'unhackable'. I have a TI-voyage 200 which has a 68K which is fun to program in C (wrote a I2C driver for it that used Ti's link port based on the pseudo code form Wikipedia).

I do have a HP 41CX that I need to do some surgery on. The batteries corrected the flexi circuit board and it has been dropped breaking a few connection 'pins' from the LCD. I fixed the 'pins' and got a stable enough connection with an external power supply to prove it works. I did find a guy in Europe that had some of the flexi battery contact PCBs made up and I bought some scratch resistant acrylic to replace the broken LCD cover. It has been on my 'to-do' list for more than a year now

Maybe a homemade 65c02 based pocket computer would be a fun project? Hmmm.....

It has been nice that there is still good support for these now even nearly 30 years after production ended. I have Diego's Clonix-D module in mine holding several ROM module images including Ángel Martin's latest 2017 versions of his Warp_Core, and his 41z which gives a 4-level (plus L) complex-number stack and over a hundred complex-number operations all written in assembly for maximum performance, ten times as fast as the complex-number functions in my Advantage module. The bottom of my links page has 60+ HP-41 links, at http://wilsonminesco.com/links.html#hp41 .


Someone gave me a very beat-up but still-working HP-71 which I've had thoughts of converting to a 65xx-based computer, using just the case, keyboard, and LCD. It'd be too big for a pocket (except maybe in overalls) but it'd be cool.



I did make an effort to more-or-less a pocket 65c02 workbench computer years ago, but my for this computer outpaced my progress, and before I got very far, I could see that everything I wanted would not fit, as I was limited to DIPs and wire-wrap at the time. It's shown about 60% of the way down the page at http://wilsonminesco.com/BenchCPU/ .

I have two HP-71B's which are smaller, but they're still in perfect condition and command a high price on eBay, so they're off limits for this, besides the fact that it would be quite a challenge for a hobbyist to make custom 65xx innards for these.



This is the one I learned Forth on.

_________________
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?

@GARTHWILSON - I have been perusing your website and have read though the stack treatise, well most of it anyhow. The benchCPU is also interesting. In fact it is your fault I recently became interested in Forth, you kept making Forth references so I had to do some more research. I just found a really nice online tutorial complete with a JavaScript forth interpreter. I'll post a link in the Forth subject area.

I have one of these. I had no idea it had a 6502 derived processor. Neat!

These powerful programmable handhelds from HP: don't suppose anyone wrote a 6502 emulator for them? (HP-71B can be programmed in Forth, and we have a 65816 emulator in Forth...)

You do realize that these machines have CPUs rated in DIPS (Dozens of instruction per second), right?

I think if I wanted to make a 6502 handheld, I'd start with a salvaged TI graphing calculator, and use that as a platform.

Simply because these are a dime a dozen, and not really collectible. With all the hacking that's been done on these things, I would imagine they're pretty well documented from all sorts of angles. Heck, the community even brute forced the signing key for these things.

They're also 8-Bit friendly since they have a Z80 buried inside of them somewhere, I've never seen the actual circuit board (for all I know it has 5 parts: ASIC, Keyboard, LCD, Battery and PC Board).

But given their disposable nature and ubiquity, I wouldn't give tearing one of these apart a second glance.

I mostly understand why, but it's a shame that HP mostly gave up on the calculator market.

Modern calculators are amazing, unfortunately none of them are HPs.

What about the HP Prime?

The DM42 is rather nice too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cY5Djl0qEa8

That would be 10-digit decimal floating-point operations. The HP-71B with Math module could do a 1,024-point FFT in four and a half minutes, only half the time it took the original IBM PC to do it in GWBASIC, even though the IBM's clock speed was about seven times as high (4.77MHz versus 650kHz). In any case, the idea here would be to use only the shell, keyboard, and LCD of the commercially made unit, and re-equipping it with a custom PCB using an '02.


That might be a good idea. The only big challenge might be feeding the LCD, unless it's a module with its driver onboard and you can find out how to send it the information you want to display.


Unfortunately HP is no longer the company it once was.


Yes, Swiss Micros seems to be doing an amazing job.

_________________
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?

The 50g can be programmed in C, to good effect:
http://sense.net/~egan/hpgcc/#Example%3 ... 20Shootout