Recently, I had the need to design a small and easy to program controller for my dad. He’s 83 and still an avid astronomer. He wanted a simple to program device to automate some of the stuff in the observatory (roof, heating, lights, etc.) that would be fairly resilient to short term power failures and easy to interface to.

Okay, there are about a million ways to skin this cat but as the basis for the project I chose a 6502 variant, the 6507. Why? Size, power consumption, familiarity with the hardware and instructions, have a drawer full of them….

To make along story short, since the 6507 has only an 8k memory space, I needed to supply the thing with a compact language that my dad knows. So I came across Tom Pitman’s Tiny Basic (actually via a link from this site). I took his offered KIM-1 hex listing and after a week of late nights, turned it into an assembler listing. For my application I relocated it to run in ROM at $1400, but with not much effort you could place it anywhere.

I used Kowalski’s emulator to help me discover the true nature of this little beast and get it going. I have a version that loads right up in the emulator and runs just fine. It’s only commented to the extent I needed to get it running. I plan to comment it more, but have other cats to herd right now.

I sent a copy to Tom, but it seems he could not be less interested.

In any case, it works and is useful. If anyone wants a copy, just PM me and I will send it to you. Feel free to add/modify comments and share.

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Bill

Ah, there's the real reason! (65c02 would take a lot less power, have more addressing modes, bugs removed, internal oscillator, etc..)

You could send it to Mike Naberezny (owner of this website) so he can put it up. I think a lot of people would be interested in looking at it.

Yup, #1 spec was, "Use the suff I have"

I'd attach it here but the attachment option in php does not seem to be turned on for this site.

Do you have an e-mail co-ordinate for Mile?

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Bill

His Email address (one of many) is webmaster@6502.org.

Done.

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Bill

Just an update for any one interested. Tom Pittman has posted it at end of first paragraph here:

http://www.IttyBittyComputers.com/IttyBitty/TinyBasic/

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Bill