Welcome to Level1 Devember!

[stenstorp]

Hope it’s not too late to join! I’m building an expandable 6502 based computer and some expansion cards to go along with it.

DIY 6502 computer With Expansion

This is a project I’ve been working on for a few weeks now, may as well make it a #devember2020 thing to get the last major details worked out. About me: I’m an Australian Computer Science student with my final year next year. I have a particular interest in computer hardware and low level programming (Anything higher level than C confuses me). I’ve also been meaning to improve my electronics skills so why not combine all of these things and make my own computer. How hard can it be! About the project: At the core, this is a basic 6502 based computer using all brand new parts (Yes, you can still get 6502’s brand new!) with the ability to add external devices. The computer has 32kB of RAM, 24kB of ROM and 8kB of IO space for up to 8 cards. The devices I’m currently planning are a Serial IO card, Parallel IO card and a VGA text mode display card. This is all heavily inspired by Ben Eater’s YouTube videos but I’m giving it all my own spin and I’m going to get some actual circuit boards made. I actually just today received my first prototype PCB’s and assembled the main computer module: [IMG_20201206_174839] The parallel card has already been designed and got the PCB for it with the CPU boards. The card I’m currently working on is the VGA card. It will (hopefully) be able to output either 40x25 or 80x25 Text characters at 640x480 which needs only 1kB or 2kB of RAM which is perfect as a single device can access 1kB of address space and I can make a device use as many device slots as I want! I’m going to make the schematics freely available as I thing other people might like to take a look at this. I’ll post some more details in my next post. Hope you all find this interesting!