Category Archives: 6502

VCF West: Adding A Front Panel To The 6502

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When you think about vintage computers from the 1970s, the first thing that should spring to mind are front panels loaded up with switches, LEDs, and if you’re really lucky, a lock with a key. Across all families of CPUs from the ’70s, you’ll find front panel setups for Z80s and 8080s, but strangely not the 6502. That’s not to say blinkenlights and panel switches for 6502-based computers didn’t exist, but they were astonishingly rare.

If something hasn’t been done, that means someone has to do it. [Alexander Piersen] built The Cactus, a  6502-based computer that can be controlled entirely …read more

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Find Your Level – Extracting NES Game Data Using Python

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Just this summer, the Nintendo Entertainment System had its 35th release anniversary, and even after years of discontinuation, it is still going strong in the hacker community. Exhibit A: [Matthew Earl]. For one of his upcoming projects, [Matthew] needed to get his hands on the background images of the NES classic Super Mario Bros. Instead of just getting some ready-rendered images and stitching them together, he decided to take care of the rendering himself, once he extracts the raw game data.

Since there is no official source code available for Super Mario Bros, [Matthew] used a disassembled version to get …read more

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VCF East: Cactus, Retro Because it Wants to Be

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Among the rows of digital dinosaurs, one blinking front panel stood out. It certainly looked the part of a retro computer; with banks of blinking LEDs and multicolored paddle switches. But upon closer inspection, the laser cut wooden front panel betrays the fact that this machine is an impostor. It may have the appearance of a machine from the heady days where home computers looked like they could have doubled as a prop on the bridge of Kirk’s Enterprise, but it’s actually a product of much more modern provenance.

It’s called the Cactus, a love letter to the homebrew …read more

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A 6502 with a Custom Language

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The 6502 has a long history with hackers. The Apple computer (the one with no keyboard or even case) had a 6502. So did the Kim-1. [Dolo’s] version is a bit more refined, though. He started it a few years ago in response to one of our contests, but he’s been making improvements to it ever since. In particular, the custom programming language, Dflat, has many improvements lately, including true functions and high-resolution drawing.

The hardware has a CPU running at over 2.5 MHz, 44K of RAM, 16K of PROM, and 16K of video RAM. There’s plenty of I/O, including …read more

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34C3: Vintage Verification, Stop Nuclear War With A 6502

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Our better-traveled colleagues having provided ample coverage of the 34C3 event in Leipzig just after Christmas, it is left to the rest of us to pick over the carcass as though it was the last remnant of a once-magnificent Christmas turkey.  There are plenty of talks to sit and watch online, and of course the odd gem that passed the others by.

It probably doesn’t get much worse than nuclear conflagration, when it comes to risks facing the planet. Countries nervously peering at each other, each jealously guarding their stocks of warheads. It seems an unlikely place to find a …read more

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34C3: Vintage Verification, Stop Nuclear War With A 6502

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Our better-traveled colleagues having provided ample coverage of the 34C3 event in Leipzig just after Christmas, it is left to the rest of us to pick over the carcass as though it was the last remnant of a once-magnificent Christmas turkey.  There are plenty of talks to sit and watch online, and of course the odd gem that passed the others by.

It probably doesn’t get much worse than nuclear conflagration, when it comes to risks facing the planet. Countries nervously peering at each other, each jealously guarding their stocks of warheads. It seems an unlikely place to find a …read more

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Espple: A Wireless Apple 1 on an ESP8266

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The Apple 1 was one of the three big hobbyist computers that burst onto the scene in 1977. Unlike the PET 2001 and the TRS-80, only a couple hundred Apple 1s were ever produced, and with only a handful in existence today, you’ll have to fork out some serious money to get a Wozniak original for yourself.

The Apple 1 experience is easily emulated, of course, but this ESP8266 emulates the Apple 1 on hard mode. Dubbed the Espple by its creator [Hrvoje Cavrak], it emulates the 6502-based original in all its 1-MHz glory, while providing 20-kB of RAM, a …read more

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Analyzing The 6502 With Python And Cheap Dev Boards

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The Before Times were full of fancy logic analyzers. Connect the leads on these analyzers to a system, find that super special ROM cartridge, and you could look at the bus of a computer system in real time. We’ve come a long way since then. Now we have fast, cheap bits of hardware that can look at multiple inputs simultaneously, and there are Open Source solutions for displaying and interpreting the ones and zeros on a data bus. [hoglet] has built a very clever 6502 protocol decoder using Sigrok and a cheap 16-channel logic analyzer.

This protocol decoder is capable …read more

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This 6502 Computer Project Is A Work Of Art

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If you were a home constructor in the 8-bit era, the chances are that if you built a microcomputer system you would have ended up with a bare printed circuit board and a terminal. If you were on a budget you might have had a piece of stripboard as well, or maybe even wire-wrap. Beautiful cases were out of reach, they came with expensive commercial computers that were not the preserve of impoverished hobbyists.

Constructing an 8-bit machine in 2017 is a much easier process, there are many more options at your disposal. There is no need to make a …read more

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6502 Retrocomputing Goes to the Cloud

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In what may be the strangest retrocomputing project we’ve seen lately, you can now access a virtual 6502 via Amazon’s Lambda computing service. We don’t mean there’s a web page with a simulated CPU on it. That’s old hat. This is a web service that takes a block of memory, executes 6502 code that it finds in it, and then returns a block of memory after a BRK opcode or a time out.

You format your request as a JSON-formatted POST request, so anything that can do an HTTP post can probably access it. If you aren’t feeling like writing …read more

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