6502.org

20 years ago, on Fri 30 Aug 2002, the 6502 Forum migrated from Delphi Forums to forum.6502.org. Within 24 hours, the first eight accounts were created. Within the first year, 125 people joined. Since then, forum.6502.org has often grown more than 5% per year (by accounts and messages) and it approaches 4000 users, 7500 discussions and 100000 messages. Unfortunately, our long suffering administrators have also deleted a proportionate increase in spam. If you've never seen spam on the 6502 Forum, that is due to the unpaid and often thankless work that you don't see.

For quite a while, we've had accounts which are older than members. This will become increasingly common as people continue to discover the fun and frustration of 8 bit computing. Arguably, the 6502 Forum didn't get going in the form that we know until BigEd joined in Dec 2008, BigDumbDinosaur joined in May 2009 and Dr Jefyll joined in Dec 2009. Incidentally, BigEd is approaching the 10000th message; many of which have been a futile attempt to cat herd the deviously creative minds of assembly programmers and budget electronic hobbyists. That's more than two messages per day over more than 13 years. GARTHWILSON is no slouch either with more than one message per day over 20 years. I jokingly described this to a newbie as "occasionally posts on the 6502 Forum."

Sheep20 suggested that I should create a daft image for the 20th anniversary. I thought that it would be much more appropriate to design a circuit board which divides pulses by 2^26 in the highly not recommended daisy-chain configuration and displays the values 0-20 in binary. If you prefer, it should be possible to display 0-19 or 1-20. The upper limit is partially determined with one NAND gate in a manner similar to many video circuits described on the 6502 Forum. Furthermore, this leaves a sufficient number of NAND gates to implement GARTHWILSON's preferred address decode scheme.

I designed the 100mm diameter board with many other doohickeys with the intention that boards manufactured in multiples can be used for unrelated purposes. This is very much in the spirit of the Radio Shack X-in-1 electronic experiment kits where X was 15, 50, 150, 160, 200 and probably other values - although, sadly, without the child safe spring terminals. I've included idiot proof indicator lights, LED matrix, H-bridge, inductive loop and capacitive touch panel. The KiCAD 5.x files contain my idiot proofed power connector footprint and my suggested configuration for oscillator which should work with 2 pin ceramic resonator, 3 pin ceramic resonator, 0.1 inch crystal, 0.2 inch crystal or the two most popular sizes of can oscillator.

For maximum comedy value, I don't include a screen-shot.

Congratulations! Thanks Sheep64, and here's to another 20 years.

and you've read them all, in the short time you've been here?! That's amazing!

The one who alerted me to 6502.org in the late 1990's was Wally Daniels, a tech in the Pratt & Whitney turbine engine plant in Nova Scotia, member #7 here on the phpBB forum when Mike migrated it from Delphi. Wally had post number 7777 here. He contacted me after reading an article of mine in Forth Dimensions magazine in the 90's, and he and I went on to exchange a megabyte or two of emails, back when it was all plain text only (not even html, let alone pictures) and a whole printed page was only a couple of KB, meaning a megabyte was about 500 pages. It was like our own forum with only two members. He was using my '816 Forth on a Mensch computer at work. Then he found 6502.org (in the Delphi days) and wrote to me that I should check out 6502.org, as "it's a great place to go if you feel like you're the only one in the world left still using the 6502." I don't remember if I had heard of WDC yet. Unfortunately Wally Daniels has moved on. It might have partly had to do with taking care of his handicapped daughter, as it could be that keeping up with everything was just too burdensome.


It's not bad at all now since Mike implemented ways that mostly keep the spambots and even a lot of human spammers out automatically. These include the capcha and a question or two, plus checks against resources we have that compile information on spammers across the web. (They may not realize it, but they leave an identifiable trail.) At its peak, perhaps fifteen years ago, the spam-handling had gotten to be extremely time-consuming, something that was non sustainable, and I was deleting spammers at a rate of 20-25 a day and cleaning up their messes. I saw how they destroyed the 6502ag Yahoo group by leaving a bad taste in everyone's mouths, a listserv which, although it still exists and has migrated to groups.io, never did bounce back. I was determined not to let that happen on 6502.org. There are only two posts on the 6502ag group so far this year, and only one last year. The owner of 6502ag (Phil Pemberton, IIRC) prefers the email kind so you don't have to go to a website. A couple of disadvantages though are that once spam has been mailed out, there's no way to "un-mail" it, and of course there's no way to edit one's old posts to correct errors, fix links that have gone dead, etc. in the emails.


As I wrote earlier,

• In the early years, I said something about 6502.org to our older son Timothy, and my wife who was nearby asked, "What's that?" and Timothy said, "That's where everybody asks their questions about the 6502 microprocessor, and Dad answers them." Well, today there are many members here who know far more than I do about various things like video, programmable logic, and various languages. Sometimes when I'm looking for something I want to review that I remember is there, I go back and read the archives, and it has been impressive to see how much expertise the forum has gained in the last decade. In the early days of the forum, the same questions and problems kept coming up over and over, so I wrote much of what later became my 6502 primer, which didn't get finished and go live until I got my own website [in 2012]. That has always been the most popular part of the site (followed by the section on scaled-integer math and look-up tables).

(The primer keeps getting updated too, as we learn more, and as forum posts make me realize something wasn't addressed adequately, and as new resources to link to become available, etc.. It's definitely not static.)

I'm constantly straining to make software more efficient, powerful, maintainable, etc., and to demonstrate what can be done with simpler hardware.


The first time I saw such a kit, I was probably 11. It got me super excited. It was a Heathkit one, and that was the first time I had heard the Heathkit name as well. It was owned by a kid who was a couple of years older than I was. About five years later, I was into amateur radio, and started what would become white a train of Heathkit purchases.

J9 is especially creative...

Wow 20 years already! Congratulations to 6502.org!

I just looked it up and saw I joined in 2005.... been on and off for times but this is definitely the place to come back for hard core 6502 talk!

Many thanks to all that keep the forum alive!