GARTHWILSON wrote:
Start with the 6502 primer. I recommend going through the whole thing, as it was written to answer the questions and problems that kept coming up over and over on this forum in its early years. It gets frequent updates. It's in 22 logically organized chapters. Thanks, reading through now. It certainly does seem to anticipate many of my questions and concerns.
BigDumbDinosaur wrote:
As Garth suggests, read through his 6502 primer first. You will be able to glean a lot of information from it.
You didn’t mention your skill level with electronics. Are you looking to design and build something from scratch or purchase a working unit from someone else? If the latter, are you interested in a fully-assembled and tested unit, or are you willing to assemble from a pile of parts and a circuit board? Do you have the skills needed to do board-level assembly work, i.e., placing and soldering parts? The answers to these questions might help you make appropriate choices in how to proceed.
Lastly, you should add your location to your forum profile so others will know about where you are in the world and perhaps be in a better position to offer help when the need arises, especially in regard to sources for parts.
I think it would be fun to build from scratch, but I may be overestimating myself. I suppose it's fair to say I have no skill with electronics. I have a vague and childlike understanding of what a resistor and a capacitor do.
The most electronic thing I've done is solder a a jumper on an electric guitar's pickups selector. I tried to build a guitar pedal from a kit, but somewhere between impatience and an old, corroded, much-to-large-tip soldering iron I botched something. I think it was probably sloppy soldering on the switch - a tiny square fellow that had something like 9 legs placed incredibly close together.
The pedal was form a kit with a PCB and all the parts. I didn't have trouble placing parts save for trouble seeing those tiny bands on the resistors and figuring out which way the IC was meant to plug into the socket. Then again, the proof is in the pudding. And my pudding didn't work in the end.
I tend to be ambitious and I'm starting to get the impression maybe I'm too ambitious going for building a computer at this stage of the game.