Introduce yourself

[Steve]

I started to look at and play with worn out relay and air logic stuff in grade school and discovered the book 'we built our own computers' in 5th or 6th grade. I did an adder for 6th grade science fair that went over with a flop, no one knowing what it was or why it only added 0 and 1's.... Except one friend. We managed to get access to the school districts pdp10 in middle school and I started on an Altair. Then came 1979, the Apple was out, Commodore had a system, Atari just released and I really wanted something besides a panel of blinking lights. I kept looking at the VT52 and all the computers that cost less and did more then the S-100 with a VT52. So I ordered an Atari and it arrived in Jan of 1980. Then came the Supper Dazzler for the S-100. By the end of the 80's I had several Amigas with video toaster, the S-100 even with 12 8bit cpus was getting to be an antique that wasn't that usefull, and bought a PC to run a bbs on. Amiga became an antique and PCs just killed them with brute force speed, memory size, video ability, hd space and price. I did animation, programming, bbs and cnc stuff on them, but always missed the programming of the Atari and Amiga hardware. I guess the 3d of the modern PC could make up for that, except the only way to access it is through Windows or Linux, no direct programming of the hardware and the intel cpus always seemed clunky.

[Dr Jefyll]

Nice to have you with us, Steve.

S-100, eh? I remember reading about that stuff back in the day, and feeling appropriately awed. But KIM-1 is where I picked up, so S-100 was not a hands-on experience for me. Looking back, I don't feel deprived for having missed that, TBH. But I'm sure many creative people found S-100 to be fertile ground.

As an aside: regarding direct programming of hardware, modern PC's aren't entirely intractable, especially if you're able to install a parallel printer port (LPT) card. It's true the OS may take exception (!) to your code's brazen LPT accesses, but the difficulty can be sidestepped by first loading an appropriate driver to selectively disable protection. For more on this and related matters, see the thread Experimental IO (including usb LPT ports) on the modern PC.

cheers
Jeff

[Steve]

I've got several cnc's and a few other machines running on printer ports, under dos. I've done the driver thing and got involved with a couple OS projects. Gotten around windows to lowlevel format usb drives to boot exe programs or other os's, but it gets to be a bigger thing when you get to video and some of the other things that expect a windows/linux driver and have hardware that isn't standard with no internal details released to the public. But thank you for the info, mostly I've gone to arduino or ladder logic on a plc. They will let you talk to the PC through a usb and will let you interface to hardware on the other side. The newer cnc's are all on arduino (home stuff). If you are interested in a printer port driver that lets you talk directly to the port and mostly get around timing problems caused by windows Mach3 cnc software has a driver included with it that does a reasonable job of that.

S-100 was mostly an ugly mess of non standards A computer, 8 inch hard drive and couple 8 inch floppies, in a metal box the size of a dish washer did look impressive.

Thanks for the welcome

[Pax_1601]

Hi everbody!

I'm a 24 years old soon to be (hopefully) aeronautical engineer. I've always been attracted to digital electronics, I've been playing with Arduino's for some time but I wanted to understand what was going on "under the hood". I steered my attention to x86 assembly code but things got even worse, since I had no solid background on the actual hardware on which such code was supposed to run. I then started to learn about digital computers, I've been having some fun with simulators, and I would now like to work on something "real". I first devoted my attention to the Zilog Z80 as I was under the impression that it would be a good choice to start a project, but then I stumbled across this website and I've found that the documentation and examples on the 6502 is more complete and, in my opinion, more suitable for a total newbie like myself.
I've had some electronics courses during my college years and I've already worked with C code and some simple assembly on embedded systems, but from the hardware point of view I've little to no experience.

Best regards,

Davide

[BigDumbDinosaur]

Pax_1601 wrote:

I first devoted my attention to the Zilog Z80 as I was under the impression that it would be a good choice to start a project, but then I stumbled across this website and I've found that the documentation and examples on the 6502 is more complete and, in my opinion, more suitable for a total newbie like myself.
I've had some electronics courses during my college years and I've already worked with C code and some simple assembly on embedded systems, but from the hardware point of view I've little to no experience.

Welcome aboard!

[Martin_H]

Welcome aboard.

The website has links to a ton of projects that should help you get off the ground. There's also code samples to bit bang the PS/2 keyboard protocol, I2C, and SPI. With those there's an amazing number of devices that you can interface. There are so many free software development tools (assemblers, C compilers, interpreters) that you won't have a problem there either.

[geekpower]

Hello, everyone! I came to a healthy obsession with computer-ness in the early 80s when I received a TI99/4a for Christmas - perhaps it was my father's way of ensuring I'd stay out of trouble. As the TI slowly faded into obscurity I bought a C64 in 1984 and then an Amiga in 1986 and ultimately went on to work with x86 Unix boxen for many years there-after in the internet security field. But what drew me to the C64 and continues to draw me back in that direction now is the openness that it and its brethren shared in their invitation to learn to program. It would be a shock to any modern computer user to turn on a machine and have it boot into a language interpreter, such as Basic. But in the early 80s, this was the norm. And I'm so very thankful for that. The TI and then the Commodore invited me to interact with it in a playful, exploratory way; to figure out what it could do; it invited me into conversation with it, a simple 8-bit computer.

And now, many years later, and a shift in vocation from computing to filmmaking (I'm a cinematographer), I've come back to my early love of a form of device that a single person might come to know quite intimately - the 8-bit computer. I started building my own homebaked (well, mostly baked) system last November with the help of this website and a few others. The wealth of information here and the willingness for others to share their work has made the experience a joy and reminded me of what computing was like when I was a kid. Thank you!

My little system (JUDD6502 is what I tend to call it - there's a story there) now has a rudimentary OS on a 32K ROM, displays output to an NTSC monitor (via Daryl's and Grant's ATMEGA-based video display system), has a lovingly salvaged C64 keyboard for input (and a PIC 16f84a matrix to ASCII converter that I hacked together) and can load/save programs to/from its 32K of RAM via a USB connection and runs Lee's ehBasic (from ROM). I'm now working on my own NTSC board, a parallel printer interface and beginning to play with Rich Cini's IEC bus implementation (for printer and disk drive support). It's absolutely marvelous. I'm excited to become more of a participatory member of this group as well, as I've gotten so much from quietly reading everyone's wonderful and helpful experiences these last several months.

Thank you!

[BigEd]

Welcome, and thanks for telling your story. It would be nice to see a thread about that JUDD6502 when you're ready!

[Dr Jefyll]

geekpower wrote:

JUDD6502 is what I tend to call it - there's a story there

We're all ears!

(And eyes. Nice if you can include a photo of your project, if you choose to post.) Start a new thread, though, please. Welcome!

-- Jeff

[Alarm Siren]

Hi. Alarm Siren here, or Alsi for short.

About Me
I'm in my mid-twenties, I'm currently in the third of four years of a Master's Degree in Computer Systems Engineering. Prior to this, I've worked as a freelance web programmer, a technology salesman, and for a major automotive parts supplier where I worked on ECU verification tools (software and hardware... mostly software). I love cats, motorcycling, theatre and of course anything with wires, especially retro wires.

About My Project
OK, so, why am I here? I've got a project. Said project revolves around the 65C02. Specifically, I'm making an as-close-as-possible recreation of the 65C02 on an FPGA using VHDL. This is my university project for this year. Additionally to this, I'm also building a basic "test computer" to interface with said FPGA to assist in testing and verifying the FPGA-6502. I hope afterwards to use the test computer as a basis for a more elaborate 6502 based computer design that I'll build off my own back.

[BigEd]

Welcome, and thanks for posting your intro!

[arduinoenigma]

Hello, [ArduinoEnigma] here..
This is my first post in this forum.
I learned 6502 assembly language in order to write programs for the KIM Uno platform.
I started with a clock program and more recently wrote a simulation of the Enigma Z30 Machine.
Those projects can be found at: https://hackaday.io/projects/hacker/72667

[gazaxian]

Hi

I'm gazaxian, used to be a games programmer a long time ago in a galaxy far far away and cut my teeth on 6502. Started with an Acorn Atom at home and had games released on C64, NES and the 6502-ish SNE

I still hobby code from time to time and messing around with an emulation project.

Still love 6502, just wrote a song about it

https://soundcloud.com/gyratory/planet-6502

gaz

[BigEd]

Welcome! That might be the second 6502 song announced here...

[gazaxian]

Thanks and that's a great track