Education and 6502.org

[sburrow]

Was reading a topic (here viewtopic.php?f=12&t=6465) and got inspired. I've moved my post here to a separate topic:

enso wrote:

I am all for kindness, but it is kind to tell a tone-deaf friend not to pursue a career in music, a hopelessly math-averse teen to avoid a career in engineering, etc. It is always kind to steer people away from idiocy and self-deception, even if they hate you for it. Do we need more 6502 'experts' who don't know what a register is or tell the difference between a capacitor and their knuckle? Should we be excited about the 'enthusiasm' of some wannabe 'influencer' who heard some misquote on Hackaday and wants to pathetically impress their 'audience' by name-dropping Ben Muncher in their 1-hour long how-to-configure the 6502 breadboard simulator video (subscribe now)?

Exactly. Thank you enso, this is right on point. I have so much I'd like to say about education in general, but it's probably not topic relevant to the virtual Ben Eater experience specifically. I would like to say thank you for helping people face reality. We really don't have that enough in this day and age. I'm a math professor, and I will go to great lengths to help folks reach their goals. But that does not mean everyone should be an engineer.

Back when I was a newbie, even before finding Garth's site and eventually coming here, I did try some 'virtual breadboard' apps for myself. And was HIGHLY disappointed. I have not tried this one specifically, so I cannot say left or right on it. Spending the $30 on a breadboard, some wires, and a few chips was very educational though, as I learned that I needed to actually power the chips to have them run (go figure), and so many other things you kind of miss when so new to it.

I think what would have helped me the most when I was so so very new was:

1) Pointing me to the right tools and resources. I randomly found Garth's site on the internet and I actually emailed him as he says on the site. And he replied! He pointed me here, and the rest is history. Tools also include things like using KiCad, as65, minipro, and Aguamander's revisions of the "mos6502" C++ library.

2) Encouragement and criticism. I certainly found that here! Golly I had no clue what I was doing a year and a half ago. The folks here offer a wonderful balance with Ed's gentle encouragements and BDD's sharp encouragements. I need them both. I need pats on the back and slaps against the head. And that's ok, both are constructive.

3) Asking questions and getting help. Without Garth's site and his incredibly helpful posts and emails, I wouldn't be here now. Without Bill's (plasmo) taking my V1 board and finding that I simply crossed two wires, I wouldn't be here now. I could go on, but this place acts like a hub for real people to talk to other real people. I have gained many friends while here, and I am thankful for everyone's help in my journey.

I guess I got a bit off topic. Just happy the 6502.org site exists and all that it brings. Virtual Ben Eater breadboards or not.

Chad

[sburrow]

And since we are talking about education more specifically now, I have a question for you (since you are here reading this):

What drove you to want to build your own 6502 computer? What tools were most helpful for you early on? What are the best techniques to educate someone on 6502 early on?

Thanks everyone!

Chad

[BigEd]

Thanks for the new thread Chad!

I think my experience of building a 6502 system was a question of necessity: it was a kit computer, in the late 70s, and all I could afford. So, I assembled it and soldered it - I didn't have to design it. It didn't work, so I did the only thing I could think to do, which was to resolder every joint, and then it did work.

So, I didn't get any experience of designing or of hardware debugging out of that.

However, the manual and the accompanying magazine articles did lay out all the principles of operation, and I studied all those and felt I got an appreciation for how it operated.

At some point I made a trivial recommended mod and doubled the clock speed. And at some point I built some kind of 8 bit peripheral - just gone downstairs to check, it's a 6520 PIA and a Ferranti ZN425E A2D, connected to the 6502 bus. I'm not sure if I ever got anything out of that peripheral board, or into it. I didn't have anything other than a multimeter.

My learning style is heavily on reading and diagrams. I did, some years prior to that computer, have a Philips electronics kit, which included two or three transistors, and allowed for building an AM radio. It also had an excellent little instruction book, and I think I learnt a lot from that.

I see I've posted in this earlier thread, including mention of Alan Wilkinson's book on building a computer from transistors:
First micro or computing experiences

It would be great to see other answers to this question, but meanwhile here are a couple of earlier related threads:
First CPU project, oscilloscope and more
Cheap oscilloscope & other test equipment

[sburrow]

BigEd wrote:

However, the manual and the accompanying magazine articles did lay out all the principles of operation, and I studied all those and felt I got an appreciation for how it operated.

I didn't have anything other than a multimeter.

My learning style is heavily on reading and diagrams.

This is a lot of good info Ed, thank you! So, you are a reader. You study, you search and then research.

I think each of us has at least *some* of that in us. "Did you read the datasheet?" But I'm guessing some of us out there are also video watchers? I do enjoy being 'edutained' by videos, but I do know that reading is where most of the learning would come from.

How about experimentation? I know there are *some* of us that didn't listen to mama and touched that hot stove! Are breadboards your thing, getting quick feedback to changes? Did you see something and say, "I can do that!" or even, "I can do better!"?

Me personally, I'm a mixed bag. I read, but then I ponder on what I read. I watch videos more for inspiration and general analysis, not for nitty gritty. Breadboards were good for me early on, but I nearly refuse to use them anymore. I feel like I have to re-build everything from the ground up, even if it looks identical to what I started with. I ask questions, I make mistakes, I try again.

Here is a general example. Say I was reading Garth's Primer and I had an idea/question about something. Garth's site it static, it doesn't change, so either I go somewhere else and hopefully find it (searching keywords is NOT my specialty), or I ask a human. That's where the 6502.org Forum comes in, because we can ask those questions. There have only been a couple of times where I have simply just copied whatever someone told me to do here. Instead, I take responses and re-build what I had from the ground up again, with additional knowledge. Always learning. The community here provides sources of education without being an official "school". Things like Ben Eater videos and Garth's Primer pages have real importance, but asking humans questions is yet another vital part of the education process.

Just some thoughts. Thank you!

Chad

[BigEd]

Absolutely, asking questions and doing experiments are surely good tactics. I was pretty solitary(*) - my UK101 probably turned up when I was about 17, so we're talking about ages 13-17 probably, in that part of my life, and I don't think I had anyone to ask questions of. Of course there was no such thing as streaming video, but what we did have (in the UK) was the Open University, which did public broadcasts of educational material at or about undergraduate level. I watched a lot of that, but I couldn't say exactly when - certainly into the 80s, but that's later.

To some extent, there might be more skill needed in getting good answers from forums or video content, because the people responding are not usually skilled in teaching, and are sometimes mistaken in what they think. Or their knowledge is not as good as it might ideally be. Whereas learning from textbooks, you're learning from something carefully put together by someone who should know the topic well and whose work is filtered through a selection process and an editing process. Similarly, to a slightly lesser extent, magazine articles.

In any case, there's a skill to asking questions, and a skill to answering them. And a skill to figuring out which experiments to perform, and in deducing what can be deduced from the result.

And of course we all start off with very little knowledge, and ascend to a state of imperfect knowledge, so it's always a question of doing what you can with what you have.

If not experimentation with breadboards, I think experimentation with simulations can be very useful. Of course, a simulation is not reality - the map is not the territory - but the point of a simulation is to capture and distil certain aspects of reality. You can get the digital logic right, for example, and not worry about power and ground.

I think it's a tactical error to try to do everything at once: to get the logic right, the program right, the signal integrity, the PCB routing, the reset circuit. All these things have their interesting properties, all of them can be broken, or unreliable, or just about working, or completely robust.

One thing about teaching, and about learning, is motivation. I gather adult education benefits from a motivated learner, more so than education of children in school. (But some schools and some teachers are better than others. The best teacher is not necessarily the best practitioner, and vice versa.) With a strong motivation you can learn in larger, longer sub-projects, because you don't need the reward quite so often of making something work. With weaker motivation, every step needs to be simple and small and have a reward to it. It takes some work to design such a fine-grained curriculum.

Edit to add footnote: (*) Not really the word, as I had friends, including friends interested in calculators, computers and programming. But no mentors in this, perhaps that's what I mean.

[Paganini]

Hi Chad,

Like you, I saw the old thread when it got bumped. I was momentarily excited about the breadboard simulator. Just now, my project on breadboards is almost, but not quite, working. With my scope I can see that the CPU is waking up, driving the bus, and so on. But my VIA isn't getting turned on and I'm not getting any output. It looks like my 74HC688 isn't working how I expect it to. I was *just now* debating whether or not to go ahead and move it off the breadboard and onto my protoboard (just assuming there's a loose wire hidden in the mess someplace) or go ahead and go through the tiresome debugging process. Debugging is tiresome on breadboards, no two ways about it. When I saw that web simulator, my first thought was "maybe I can mock up my circuit on there and use it to debug my logic; then I won't have to unplug all those wires." Sadly, I discovered that the simulator doesn't have enough parts to really build anything except one thing: the BE6502, which makes it useless for me right now, and reduces its general utility, I think.

But, to be clear, the potential purpose of this simulator is the same as any simulator: to simplify and make convenient some troublesome aspects attached with working on the thing simulated. This particular one is pretty limited, but that doesn't mean that the *idea* of it is bad or wrong, or that such things should not exist.

As far as what brought me into 6502 land, I have a long post about that here:

https://retrocomputingforum.com/t/i-wan ... chine/1584

From before I came to 6502 land!

Edit: just to add that one of my favorite things about that thread is that, early on, Ethan (elb) put in to say that an actual PDP-11 is not so bad, as long as you have a garage to keep it in.

[Krangerich]

sburrow wrote:

What drove you to want to build your own 6502 computer?

Clearly Ben Eaters videos. Some months ago nostalgia infected me and I browsed the internet about the 8088. Then somehow I ended up reading some books about digital design, solved the "Turing Complete" game, watched a ton of youtube videos about everything remotely digital design related, learned Verilog, bought a pile of electronics stuff from mouser & co.
Recently I successfully added the ACIA to my 6502 computer and now I'm considering to write my own simulator for rapid prototyping.

Quote:

What are the best techniques to educate someone on 6502 early on?

IMHO you cannot "educate someone on 6502", because - let's be honest - this is a) an absolute geek niche and b) not exactly rocket science, so what you need are loads of fun and motivation (and some pocket money).
If someone wants to learn, he will manage to do so. If someone loses fun, he will turn away and do other things.

If you wanted to ask, whats the best things are that you can provide to other people learning 6502:
* Positivity - there is enough nerdrage on the internet
* Useful no-nonsense information - Ben Eaters videos for example are among the best learning resources I've ever seen
* Inspiration
* Curating the existing resources - there is so much information about everything that you get lost in the rabbithole and accomplish nothing

[BigDumbDinosaur]

Paganini wrote:

Edit: just to add that one of my favorite things about that thread is that, early on, Ethan (elb) put in to say that an actual PDP-11 is not so bad, as long as you have a garage to keep it in.

...and a generating station nearby to power it.

[BigEd]

Krangerich wrote:

the best things are that you can provide to other people learning 6502:
* Positivity - there is enough nerdrage on the internet
* Useful no-nonsense information - Ben Eaters videos for example are among the best learning resources I've ever seen
* Inspiration
* Curating the existing resources - there is so much information about everything that you get lost in the rabbithole and accomplish nothing

Great list Krangerich!

[BigDumbDinosaur]

sburrow wrote:

What drove you to want to build your own 6502 computer?

It was mostly illness that led to me building a 65C816 contraption. I needed an activity that I could physically handle while undergoing rounds of chemo, and since I like to write assembly language programs, I decided to get into building something on which to test my code.

Quote:

What tools were most helpful for you early on?

My experience with the 6502 dates back to late 1976, a time when I don’t believe there were any native development tools. Software development had to be done via cross-assembly, which mean two learning curves to negotiate. In my case, my employer had a cross-assembler that run on the company’s S360 mainframe and was a FORTRAN rendition of the MOS Technology reference assembler that (apparently) was meant to be run on a PDP-11, which machine we didn't have at the time.

Documentation consisted of photocopies of photocopies of photocopied MOS Technology “notes,” some handwritten, which basically described the instruction set, briefly talked about the peripheral devices, the 6520 PIA, mostly—the 6522 was barely off the drawing board at the time, and recommended the engineer purchase a KIM to get acquainted with the 6502. The intended application we had for the 6502 was a locomotive event recorder, in which the I/O chips were mostly Motorola stuff. Since I was pressed into service to write the code to run this thing, it meant studying Motorola data sheets, as well as the MOS notes. At least the Motorola data sheets were typeset and well-organized.

Quote:

What are the best techniques to educate someone on 6502 early on?

I can’t answer that question, as everyone learns in different ways. The only thing I can offer is experiment with actual hardware, not simulators, acquire good software development tools (my preference is the Kowalski assembler/simulator) and be organized when you come here to post questions. I can’t speak for the others around here, but I have nearly infinite patience with machines, but not so much with people, especially folks who can’t be bothered to at least organize their thoughts before posting a cry for help. Supplying a legible schematic and memory map also helps.

No one teaches anything about the 6502 anymore, as far as I know. However, there is certainly no shortage of information about it—the 6502 family is arguably the most documented microprocessor family ever, if for no other reason than sheer ubiquity. Just beware of well-meaning but naive individuals who put together entire websites full of incorrect information.

[GARTHWILSON]

sburrow wrote:

Here is a general example. Say I was reading Garth's Primer and I had an idea/question about something. Garth's site is static, it doesn't change, so either I go somewhere else and hopefully find it (searching keywords is NOT my specialty), or I ask a human.

Um, small correction: My site is just not interactive.  I'm constantly making improvements though (typically a few a week), based on new things that come up on the forum I realize I hadn't addressed or I needed to make more clear, also new & helpful links that come up on the forum, fixing links that have gone dead, etc..

Quote:

What drove you to want to build your own 6502 computer? What tools were most helpful for you early on?

My early electronics interest was primarily stereo and amateur radio, back when there were no digital electronics involved in either of those.  My interest did not include computers.  That came later, first with programmable calculators in 1981 to do iterative calculations for my analog electronics designs (since my otherwise adequate slide rule was not programmable), then three years later with my interest in automating repetitive processes on the workbench (and that story is in my intro post here).

In 1982 at the local community college, I signed up for a class that had a title something like "troubleshooting microcomputer systems," and at the same time, a class in FORTRAN IV.  I suppose my idea was to just be a little more well rounded.  The first one turned out to be an introductory 6502 class.  Before that, I had no knowledge of what a 6502 (or Z80 or 8080, etc.) was.  I kept my notes, but did nothing with the learned information until 1985, when I saw the possibility of using it on the workbench to substitute for equipment I couldn't afford.  Resources back then did not include the internet or forums.  It was limited to magazines and books.  I made my first computer in 1985, which you can see here.  Code was written on paper only, and assembled by hand, and programmed into the EPROM with a manual home-made programmer where I set each address and data by switches and pushed the button for the program pulse, which was super slow, but worse, very prone to human error.  The computer worked on first power-up and never required any troubleshooting; but was rather useless.  It was however a stepping stone to later things that were super useful.

My article on zero-overhead interrupt service in Forth on a 6502 was published in Forth Dimensions magazine in 1994, and early 6502.org forum member Wally Daniels contacted my through my phone number at the end of the article.  We subsequently got hooked up by email, back when I was on GEnie, when it was all text and I was on a 1200 or 2400bps dial-up modem.  We exchanged somewhere near a thousand pages of email about 65xx computer design.  It was our own two-man forum.  Somewhere along the line, he found 6502.org and said to me, "When you feel like you're the last one in the world using a 6502, check out 6502.org."  I don't remember if Mike had set up the forum yet; but when he did, it was originally on Delphi.

In so many cases, the new pushes out the old; but here, the new (the web) breathed new life into the old (the 6502).

[sburrow]

GARTHWILSON wrote:

Um, small correction: My site is just not interactive.  I'm constantly making improvements though (typically a few a week), based on new things that come up on the forum I realize I hadn't addressed or I needed to make more clear, also new & helpful links that come up on the forum, fixing links that have gone dead, etc..

Garth, I said "static" as in the opposite of "dynamic". Certainly you do update and add to the site, and I'm thankful for that! But I can't ask your website questions. ( If you programmed a bot to answer common questions or something, I suppose I *could* ask your website questions then! ) My point was that reading text can only go so far, asking humans specifics is important. No offense to your most helpful and wonderful website.

GARTHWILSON wrote:

Code was written on paper only, and assembled by hand, and programmed into the EPROM with a manual home-made programmer where I set each address and data by switches and pushed the button for the program pulse, which was super slow, but worse, very prone to human error. 

I started that way too, just in 2021. Funny humans

BigDumbDinosaur wrote:

In my case, my employer had a cross-assembler that run on the company’s S360 mainframe and was a FORTRAN rendition of the MOS Technology reference assembler that (apparently) was meant to be run on a PDP-11, which machine we didn't have at the time.

Uhh... Wow. That's impressive indeed. Someone transitioning from C++ to Java is child's play in relative perspective.

BigDumbDinosaur wrote:

I can’t answer that question, as everyone learns in different ways. The only thing I can offer is experiment with actual hardware, not simulators, acquire good software development tools.

Good points BDD.

Krangerich wrote:

If you wanted to ask, whats the best things are that you can provide to other people learning 6502:
* Positivity - there is enough nerdrage on the internet
* Useful no-nonsense information - Ben Eaters videos for example are among the best learning resources I've ever seen
* Inspiration
* Curating the existing resources - there is so much information about everything that you get lost in the rabbithole and accomplish nothing

Yes indeed, great list.

Paganini wrote:

But my VIA isn't getting turned on and I'm not getting any output.

Reminds me of a similar issue I heard. Adrian Black (here https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LU5989eVRZs) discusses VIA issues around the 26 minute mark. I don't know if that's your issue or not, but I came to mind.

BigEd wrote:

One thing about teaching, and about learning, is motivation.

Yes indeed. I myself am a math teacher, and I know full well that if someone does not want to learn, they won't. So many folks get upset at the 'kid in the back with headphones on' or whatever. I personally don't care, if they want to fail, they fail. That's up to them. Am I supposed to yell at them to make them *want* to learn? Ha! Thankfully in college, (some) students pay for their classes and so it is monetarily important for them!

Paganini, I'm going to read that post now.

Thank you everyone!

Chad

[barnacle]

One from the right side of the pond: originally UK though now resident in Germany.

My first computer was a Sinclair MK14 - I should have known better, because I'd had no great joy with his other home-built toys, and had to threaten legal action to get the MK14 delivered - but it taught me basic assembler. I built memory expansion and video output for that, but rapidly outgrew it and looked around for another SBC kit. First choice was a Z80 Nascom, but they didn't accept my credit card, and Tangerine did. The 'desktop' computers that were around in 78 were way outside my price range. Hence I ended up with a 6502 system almost by chance, and only later discovered how much I preferred it to the Z80

How to learn though? It's so hard to say. At the time I was learning, there was no internet, no youtube, little except magazine articles which tended to specialise in more expensive - if no more common - systems. My company was kind enough to supply me with an Avocet cross-assembler which ran on a CP/M system, but I didn't see a higher level language until I got Fig-Forth organised (I don't count Basic - snob!) and now I tend to use C for pretty much everything. If I write machine code - as I must for 6502 at present - I tend to organise it in a C-style way, with consistent calling conventions and suchlike, if only for my own sanity.

But in spite of self learning (the company had a firm policy of ongoing engineering training, and promised me training on the microprocessor but by the time they got around to sending me on the course, I ended up standing in for one of the instructors!) I have still found the best way to learn is to bounce ideas off people. I'll cheerfully sit down and design a major project directly to schematic and PCB for reasons I've explained elsewhere, but I've got the experience to be able to do that with a reasonable expectation that it will work first time or with only minor changes required. It takes time and experimentation to learn how to do that - and without doubt that is much easier on a modern microcontroller with a development board and development environment than it is with a bare processor - but a 6502 (or an 8085 or 6800/05/09 or z80) is simple enough to be able to grasp the concepts of while complex enough to do something, if not actively useful, at least visible and challenging.

I don't touch prototyping boards at all; I've found them consistently unreliable over the years and quite frankly I'm impressed that the guys on YouTube who use them get anything to work at all. But nonetheless watching those videos - as well as Ben Eater for 6502 stuff, consider SLU4 for general logic design and Usagi Electric for the just plain off-the-wall. James Sharman is also worth a watch, I feel. The good thing about those channels is that things are explained in detail...

I wonder how many people rock up here from other processors? ARM (I like the Nucleo boards) or AVR?

Neil

[sburrow]

barnacle wrote:

But in spite of self learning (...) I have still found the best way to learn is to bounce ideas off people.

I don't touch prototyping boards at all; I've found them consistently unreliable over the years and quite frankly I'm impressed that the guys on YouTube who use them get anything to work at all. But nonetheless watching those videos - as well as Ben Eater for 6502 stuff, consider SLU4 for general logic design and Usagi Electric for the just plain off-the-wall. James Sharman is also worth a watch, I feel. The good thing about those channels is that things are explained in detail...

Neil

Self learning is VERY important. I would say all learning is self learning really, but some things are spoon-fed and others require sowing seeds, waiting for rain, harvesting by hand, grinding grain, baking bread, THEN consuming. You know why fast food is a thing? Because it's fast, and you don't have to do all the effort yourself. Closer to spoon-fed. It's easier, but do you really get everything you *needed* out of that hamburger? Perhaps Youtube videos are the 'fast food' of edutainment. And yet, I find myself going back every time.

One thing to keep from spoon-fed learning is to do things yourself. Get messy. Make mistakes. BDD has told me a few times to 'stop planning, start doing', or some such like that. I need that encouragement. The fear of making a mistake will keep you in stasis where you won't actually do anything at all! So what if you have to solder a couple of bodge wires? Doesn't it work? Didn't you learn?

I agree about breadboards, I have had terrible luck with them. They were great for me to try to figure out how to light up an LED, what chips do, how they function, etc. But as soon as I wanted to really make something substantial they failed me completely and *hindered* my learning because I would always be chasing rabbit trails. What I *did* learn was not to use breadboards, I guess that's good enough. They have their place, but not on my work table. And I know many of you will say I just didn't have the right breadboard. I won't go down that road again.

( Quickly, another reason I refuse to use breadboards is that I have 3 children under 5 years old. Pull one wire and the whole thing doesn't work. I'd say my PCB is at least resistant to plastic hammers! I love having my children touch the board, run their tiny fingers over even tinier little electrical components. It makes them not fearful of it, but instead, intrigued. )

Just more thoughts. When it comes to education, I could go on forever, so I'll stop here for now.

Chad

[BigDumbDinosaur]

sburrow wrote:

Self learning is VERY important.

An unknown wise man (or woman, perhaps) once opined that to be an autodidact is to be a learned man. I can’t vouch for the learned part, but I am well-aware of the importance and benefits of self-learning. Indeed, the full expanse of human knowledge ultimately comes from our autodidactic nature. Most of what I know about computer technology came from self-learning...lots and lots of reading, as well as experimenting. Lord only knows how much money literally went up in smoke over the years as I experimented.

Quote:

Perhaps Youtube videos are the 'fast food' of edutainment.

My principal beef with U-Toobe videos is exactly what you note: they are more entertaining than instructional. There’s an old sales adage that says “Sell the sizzle, not the steak.” That’s what your typical “instructional” U-Toobe video does. There are exceptions, of course, but at least in the 6502 world, I see a lot more sizzle than I do steak. Or, to steal a phrase from a Wendy’s TV commercial, “Where’s the beef?”

Quote:

The fear of making a mistake will keep you in stasis where you won't actually do anything at all! So what if you have to solder a couple of bodge wires? Doesn't it work? Didn't you learn?

As Kenny Rogers sang in “The Gambler,” you have to know when to hold them...etc. The way I see it, the amount of planning that goes into a project should be in proportion to the potential level of risk. We aren't building airliners, so we don’t need to study and plan our projects to death. Leave that to the folks at Airbus or Boeing.

On the other hand, a certain amount of studying and planning is necessary to avoid egregious errors that will doom a project to failure. Of course, money gets into the picture; chips and such aren’t free, and it’s annoying when things blow instead of go.

Quote:

When it comes to education, I could go on forever...

I’m sure you being a math professor has nothing to do with it.