sburrow wrote:
Looks great! That's how I started soldering too: the hard way. You learn more from mistakes, so that will pay off in the future for sure. It looks good, and functions well!
I find that soldering wires to things (IC socket pins, for example) is much trickier than soldering things onto PCBs. Wire wrap is much to be preferred; unfortunately I didn't have the right IC sockets for wire wrap, so I had to do a kind of hybrid (wire wrap on one end, solder on the other). Someone in a different thread recently posted a link to Phoenix Enterprises; they seem to have a nice selection of wire wrap sockets at affordable prices. Dunno why they didn't come up in my google searching. Anyway, I'll stock up on them for the next thing.
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For the keyboard interface, have you watched the Ben Eater series on PS/2 keyboard interfacing? I really liked his videos, and I used them to model my own keyboard interface.
I have, and as you say, I plan to use them as the starting point for my own interface.
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What's next after keyboard? VGA display?
Definitely video, but I think not VGA. Real VGA seems like pie-in-the-sky to me; the VGA implementations I know of either use modern microcontrollers (which I want to avoid) or use acres of breadboards / logic chips. I also don't want to do a kind of crippled VGA like Ben Eater's "worst video card in the world."
I have some interesting old CRT controller chips (Hitachi "6845s", Intel 8275) and Gerry Kane's "CRT Controller Handbook." What I'd like to do is make a true retro-style composite video out using one of those. I like the idea of making, basically, a terminal emulation board with powerful text capability (the 8275 should be particularly good for this) without worrying about graphics / sprites / colors and so on. There is a VDU board for the RC6502, but it's based on the 6847, which I don't have a spare of, and which I dislike a bit, from using it in my CoCo2.