Well, how exciting. The first versions of the PCBs for the Zolatron 64 6502-based homebrew computer have arrived, and they are very pretty. Which is just as well… I say that because at least some of these boards will serve no purpose other than as decoration. I’d made some mistakes – one annoying, one stupid but survivable, and one idiotic… Read more »
You can only go so far with a breadboard. Those things are great for quick and dirty prototypes and experimentation. But there comes a point when a breadboard is an unhealthy basis for a project. And yes, I’m aware that many people have followed Ben Eater‘s lead in building 8-bit processors and 6502-based computers on breadboards. I include myself among… Read more »
In an earlier post, I described how I was parsing commands input (via serial) into the Zolatron 64 8-bit homebrew computer in assembly language. That parsing process matched an input command with an internal list and the result was a ‘token’, a single integer value of $80 or more representing that command that is placed in a memory location. Or… Read more »
One thing it was obvious I would want to do with the Zolatron 64 6502 homebrew computer is have a routine to display the contents of sections of memory – à la Wozmon. There’s a snag, though. The content of any given byte in memory is a number, in the range 0-255. But to display this on the screen, this… Read more »
A quick recap. The Zolatron 64 6502 homebrew machine is at the point where it can print messages to an LCD screen and send and receive messages via the serial port. Most of the time. The incoming messages are put in a buffer and then printed to the LCD. And a fat lot of use that is. I wanted to… Read more »
Listening is so much harder than talking, don’t you think? That’s how it turned out with the Zolatron’s serial port, anyhow. Getting the computer to send messages was pretty easy. Receiving them? Not so much. The first stages of developing the software were typical. I wrote code that I knew should work. It didn’t. I cursed the binary gods for… Read more »
It didn’t work. Not straight away, anyhow. Once I’d wired up the 6551 ACIA chip, my UART of choice to give the Zolatron 64 a serial port, I threw together some code to test it. It was pretty simple – it took my already known-good code that prints a message to the LCD and added to that a routine to… Read more »
Okay, so the headline is overstating matters a little, but this thing is making progress. Here’s a quick series recap: I decided to brew my own 6502-based computer. Rather than start from nothing, I built a kit, with partial success. And I’ve been following along with Ben Eater’s 6502 project on YouTube. Both taught me a lot. However, even before… Read more »
Back in the first half of February, Ben Eater added parts 5 and 6 of his YouTube series on building a 6502-based homebrew computer. The enhancements he made gave the computer something it has been sorely lacking – memory. And the reason the computer needed memory was so it could have a stack. Up to that point, the code had… Read more »
Although it is possibly the slowest computer development programme in history, my Zolatron 64 6502-based homebrew design has made some progress. And this is largely due to the fine folks over at the 6502.org forum. Specifically, I have made changes to how I’m mapping the 64KB address space and the decoding I’m using to do that. I’ve been following along… Read more »
Ben Eater’s exciting 6502 project has reached the next stage – adding a display. But before I could play along, I had some remedial work to do. I’d achieved the previous stage of being able to get the LEDs to light up, but not reliably. Something was glitching and would cause the machine to go haywire. This isn’t entirely surprising… Read more »
No, this is not a post about stalking. I’ve been toying with a design for a simple 6502-based homebrew computer for a while now. I’ve built a kit and am in the middle of laying out the schematic for the first board for my own design. So I was thrilled when Ben Eater, one of the best educators on YouTube,… Read more »
The Apatco 6502 breadboard computer kit I’ve been building is complete. The next stage was to make it more so. A word of warning, though. This story does not have a happy ending. Nonetheless, someone may find the attempt at debugging entertaining or instructional, so here it is. The kit is sold (or perhaps ‘was’ would be better, as it… Read more »
Now that the Apatco kit is working – at least the basic version (having trouble with the keyboard and display upgrade) – it’s time to mess around with writing code for it. Many people swear by the now-abandoned CC65 as their compiler/assembler of choice for 6502 homebrew computers. But I’m going with Beebasm. Although inspired by and largely aimed at… Read more »
If in doubt, start again. That’s not a real saying, but it should be. As we saw in the last post, the Apatco 6502 breadboard computer was finally wired up but refusing to work. I’d fixed my faulty ROM code, buzzed out all the address and data lines to check they were connected correctly and determined that the reset circuit and… Read more »