6502.org

Has anyone updated wozmon to use ASCII?

It relies on the high bit set. A naive effort on my part failed due to some subtle interaction of that high bit, and as I am debugging too many things at once, including hardware, I was hoping that someone already did that.

A quick google search revealed several attempts to butcher it with suboptimal code, but every one I've seen preserved the high bit.

Ben Eater did it a few months back.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7M8LvMtdcgY

Nah, Mr. Eater doesn't do original work, he just copies stuff. It's the same old wozman with a bunch of stuff (intel .hex loader) added.

In fact, I am pretty sure he lifted it from this repo (from 2007), complete with hex loader:

https://github.com/cbmeeks/WOZ-Monitors/tree/master

If I'm wrong or if he provided attribution, I will be the eater of my hat. The so-called 'Ben Eater 6502 computer' is a direct copy of Garth's schematics, no attribution. Not a fan of self-promoting social media 'influencers', for those who missed my subtle hints.

Just hold your nose long enough to truly follow my link, and you'll see that he's changing the PIA I/O to ACIA and dealing directly and thoroughly with the high-bit stuff. It is not my intention to advertise on his behalf ... I'm merely saying that he appears to be offering exactly what you asked for in your top post.

I'm a bit fed-up with hearing this. Yes, it's a novel design, but not something someone else could not come up with with relative ease. Ben is a clever chap. His previous videos have seen him building a CPU from scratch. I suspect he has a good grasp of logic, decoding and so on. He's also a Commercial airline pilot and instructor and is passionate about education and educating others.

I also think he's probably done more to popularise the 6502 this millennium than anyone else. I think what he's done has been a good contribution overall. Why dismiss it?

As for his WozMon - Yes, he took a copy of a WozMon and adapted it for his own system - who hasn't? (well me, but that's another story) watch the videos - he has a few on it [WozMon] where he does a live coding session to adapt it for his system in one of them. Who cares where he got it from? He actually says in one video "Here I have it typed in" ... It's not hard to type in - 100 lines or so and in that same video he has an original listing of it with a copy of the Apple 1 manual and looking at what is on the screen, while similar to that GitHub isn't close enough for me to say that's where he got it from. WozMon sources are all over github and elsewhere. It's not hard to get.
Ben Eater is a successful commercial pilot and instructor. He's doing this not for fame and fortune but as something he's passionate about. And how would you tell the world about your design? 6502.org is just one place for 6502 projects - Facebook, like it or not has far more active groups and followers and there are a good number on YouTube who don't post here either.

I know (personally) a few popular Youtubers.. Most didn't set out to be famous influencers, most get lucky. I have 111 videos and just short of 500 followers on YouTube - if I posted a video a week I could double that in a month ... the magic number is 10,000 subscribers and you need to work hard to get that. I just bimble along doing stuff I like. Ben Eater has over a million subscribers - he's obviously doing something that many people enjoy watching.

Lifes too short.

-Gordon
(Who held a PPL for a while, but that's yet another story)

Touched a nerve there, I guess! Well, we don't have to agree on everything, and I hope you get more subscirbers! I can even tell you how -- shameless self-promotion, pretend to be the smartest person in the room, steal shamelessly, take credit for everything, and mansplain everything on every type of social media -- just be a sociopath, the kind people consider a 'success story' in our bizzarro world. Pick up sponsors, sell products and gift cards.

Since you mention he is a pilot twice, and a successful one -- whatever that means -- that shows he is highly organized, like most successful sociopaths and psychopaths.

But again, we can just agree to disagree. I have a lot of respect for you and your projects, and really don't want a fight! Peace, out.

wow! 6502.org at his best!

I think I wasn't clear in my original post...

Everyone (myself included) seems to add the high bit on input and feed it into wozmon, then strip it prior to display... That works, but I find it annoying for no good reason other than aesthetics. I briefly tried to convert the inner logic to handle ASCII and failed, because somewhere it relies on the high bit set, I think.

So I figured someone must've done it here. It's small enough to go through but I've been too lazy and feeble-minded.

P.S. Actually, there are reasons for staying in ASCII -- having hex input and output is useful, for instance.

Not everyone. Ben Eater's version does exactly what you are asking for. It is not a copy of cbmeek's one, as you claim - the only similarities I can see between the two are where neither has changed the original source.

The video linked earlier is worth a watch - he goes through the whole process of the modification, explaining how the original worked, and why each change is there. He has changed the logic to work with ASCII directly, without setting bit 7. And it still fits in 256 bytes.