The alternate world where 6502 based systems won over x86 is the one that leads to Skynet and the Terminators. (when you see the terminators POV in the first movie, his brain is running 6502 assembly commands).
There is another descendent of the 6502 which is interesting. Acorn computers in the UK used 6502s in their System single board machines, the Atom, BBC Micro and BBC Master. They used the 65816 in the Acorn Communicator. But whilst designing it visited The Western Design Centre and found in it to be a handful of guys in a house. Acorn, which was founded by Cambridge University Grads, thought “If they can do it, we can” and designed a 32 bit RISC processor very much inspired by the 6502/65816. It was called the Acorn RISC Machine but that got shortened to ARM. Acorn no longer exists but the processor company they founded does…
This was great. The number of unfinished (but still cool) projects I have heavily outnumber the finished projects and it's nice to see other peoples' "I'll get to that eventually, probably, maybe, probably not" projects :)
The fact you built this is superb work. I think learning more about the “guts” of things makes us better understand how things work. Your project has given me a few ideas!
Him: built 8bit PC from scratch for for fun Me: what's a pointer again? Good video, even if I didn't understand all of it. I hope you keep making these
Hey man, of note is the fact that I was studying my dad's old TAB pc building books and saying 'some day' for maybe a decade and a half before I finally got the guts to sit down and hack at it until I actually had something booting. I understand your strugs. Also, building something like this -- or even just doing some assembly programming -- will make the concept of a pointer REALLY click
@@TarnAlcock apparently I never replied to this WHOOPS TAB was a publisher of technical DIY books such as www.thriftbooks.com/browse/?b.search=The%20microcomputer%20builder%27s%20bible#b.s=mostPopular-desc&b.p=1&b.pp=30&b.oos I think RadioShack carried them a lot in the 80s
In my dim, distant past with video games (I was on the design team for the Magnavox Odyssey II), I did some work on the 6502 in prep for an new game that never was developed. The 6502 was a bit of a RISC system, where the designers (I dealt with Will Mathys) tweaked the hell out of the chip to minimize silicon size and execution cycles. If you used the original MOS assembler, it listed how many times each instruction was used. This was used to pare the instruction set down to a reasonable size. Thus, there was no subtract, nor a negate. a subraction was thus "complement, increment, add". Unfortunately, there was no macro assembler. This would have made available many of the pseudo instructions that could have made it look like a far more powerful processor. For instance, there was an entire bank of 256 bytes that could have been macro'd to look like 129 16 bit registers, and the appropriate macros made to look like 16 bit instructions. (An examination of the Z80 generated code shows this was used for all the IX and IY instructions, which had a prefix before each 8080 HL instruction to use IX or IY instead). GIven the clock speed advantage, it would have easily given the Z80 a run for it's money.
3:16 - I think you mean the 8088! But cool project! And you're right about it being a stretch calling the 65816 a 16 bit CPU. Nice to see a VT420 in action. Cool start to a video card as well. I'm working on one that does character mode and it's surprising how tricky it is to get right. Nice work!
Great video! I am looking right now at my DIP 68k that is collecting dust now for 20+ years thinking one day I will build a computer with this thing ..
I bought DIP 68ks back in... god, it must have been 2010? Thinking, at the time, 'I'm finally going to sit down and build my own machine for once and for all!'. Then in maybe 2018 I actually started on this machine. And only now am I actually ramping up to do something built around a 68k. So... you actually have a chance here to get it done before I do!
Nice work. There is so much satisfaction rolling your own SBC like this. I have a few PCBs in my inventory I need to get to work on including a 68010 SBC, several 87C5x boards and 1802 projects....besides my Arduino and Rasp Pi ambitions....I really love those vintage processors, especially the Motorola 680xx series (brings back memories of the early tech days of computing). I also have a couple of FPGA boards I need to tinker with as well.
Sounds familiar, I'm curious about your 1802 statement. When did you first get exposed to that CPU, and what are your plans for using one? It's how I first got started in home computing in the late 70s. It's not a great architecture, in the scheme of things, but it is something kinda near and dear to me.
Its great that you shared your dream of doing this and frustration getting there. For anybody who has tried this, your story still falls short of how absolutely frustrating it can really be. I highly encourage you to pursue your noble goal and provide a more informative and structured approach to your videos - if not ranting of course. But do rant, or loose your sanity - LOL.
what a cool video! i really enjoyed it - i find stuff like this really interesting and it just makes me realize more that we all stand on the shoulders of giants.
I'm in the process of building a hardware binary multiplier for my 6502 computer. I started off with the least significant bit and used an AND gate. Bit 1 uses two AND gates for the two partial products and a half adder to combine them. Bit 2 involves three partial products, plus the carry from bit 1, so three AND gates and two full adders. Bits 7 and 8 are the most complex but it gets easier as you progress further, with bit 15 being simply the carry out of the final adder. The control logic and three registers (8-bit multiplier and multiplicand and 16-bit product) occupy two breadboards while the AND gates and adders take up seven more. It's all built from 74HC-series logic, '08s and '283s for the multipliers, '573s for the registers, and a bit of NAND and NOR for the control logic.
Just saw this video pop up in my recommended. Neat project even if you have not got it to a full working state yet. I will check the newer vids. Back in the day I wanted to build an RCA 1802 "Elf" from chips as published in Popular Electronics magazine, but I was still very young and inexperienced with electronics. Then within a few years all the early home 8-bit computers like TRS-80, Pet, Apple II, etc. came out and allowed me (eventually) to have a computer without building it from scratch. Fast-forward a bunch of years and I'm starting to think about doing something like you did. Actually, I started to dabble with a smallish by today's standards and honestly fairly powerful Xilog Zync FPGA+ARM chip on a "trainer" board, but didn't get too far before I decided to switch over to working on an Atari 2600 game I want to make. But with the Xilog Zync I want to basically ignore the ARM part and implement a CPU, plus all typical home computer stuff like Video, Sound, IO port(s), ROM and RAM in VHDL and run it that way. Maybe some day I will get back to that! Hope you find some more enjoyment from your work!
Its great, love this, keep going. Im 47yrs old, cut my teeth on z80s using asm & always wanted to make my own computer as well. I think the future of this type of thing is (1) emulation in cad (2) cad to jlpcb & then to (3) home made sbc. Whereas back in my day no emulators were available so it was breadboard iteration after breadboard iteration etc. etc. which is sorta part of the fun and mostly part of the frustration. I programmed asm in 8 and 16bits, started learning asm 32bits and ARM (in the mid 90s?) but it got a little complicated. Thats were my dream ended.
Cool video! I started making an SBC when at uni, but back then the AVR had just appeared so I made mine with the 8088 but never finished it. I got most of my components from the garbage and got a nice 8284 clock generator. Never turned it on, though. Maybe I'll finish it. You made me want to continue the project.
The IIGS is where I really learned Assembly and then C back in the late 90s (got a woz edition one as a gift from an uncle loaded with the best expansion cards/accelerator you could get at the time) along with a Macintosh IIci in the late 90s. A lot of people back in the day didn't exactly enjoy working with the somewhat wonky architecture. Before the SNES dev kits were done and in the wild early work/testing was done on IIGS because of the similar but not quite the same platform/architecture and they were not thrilled (If I remember right the snes used a fork/derivative of the IIGS made by Ricoh that used an extended 6502 instruction set). In one way we're finally coming around to another theoretical direction where Acorn's ARM platform became the dominate architecture. We're finally getting SBC's with ARM soc's capable of keeping up with, or beating, x86-64 traditional processors. Acorn wanted RISC based processors to be the future and we're finally closer than ever before. I prefer programming low level Assembly on 32/64-bit ARM over x86-64's versions, it's a lot simpler (the name is literally has reduced instruction set in it) and consequently easier to teach people.
I remember way back in the 1990s I was studying at a tech institute and we had to write a short essay on emerging technologies that may change an existing established market in the computer market. I did an essay on the new, at the time, ARM cpus, and why they may replace x86 as the dominant cpu in the market, it wasn't received very well by the teacher and I don't think I got a great grade for my essay, fast forward to today and it dominates the mobile scene and may be making movement into the desktop environment, I remember my teacher making a smart remark, something to the effect that x86 has eclipsed all other cpus and that it has been shown to be the best option , well, funny how things change....
It's still crazy to see people just straight up making a completely new computer just for the fun of it. Really interesting to see those designs use rarely seen CPUs. One can hope that you release files for the schematics so others can try and replicate it.
There pretty much is an inheritor of the 6502's legacy, and that's the ARM series of processors, whose main influences came from the 6502 and whose ISA still bears some striking resemblances to it.
you can try to make a basic bios for the video card because every video card nowadays has basic bios just to control the color signal and other stuff like the vram and other voltages
9:53 Made in Malaysia. I live near the old Motorola factory and actually been inside of it during a school trip. Saw people in lab coats and hairnets; and were told there were a lot of gold somewhere in the facility needed for the chips (but they could be pulling our legs). Very cool to be seeing one of these chips. Hope to see more of your builds in the future. Subbed. ❤
I’ve clearly been basically dead for a bit, first time checking my comments in a long while. Happy to see one that’s actually super interesting; I would have LOVED to check out a fab back in the day. I guess now, too. Thanks for the sub!
This is a really cool project. It makes me want to do this kind of thing again myself, I've really wanted to do this kind of project myself for a long time as well, but I simply don't have the time, space, or really that much money to actually go and do it. Your use of CPLDs gives me ideas, though. Dangerous ideas. Makes me want to do a 6502 project. Also, the PC used an 8088, as opposed to the 8080. Lots of machines used the 8080, but far more used the Z80. The PC and it's clones were the only major users of the 8088 and x86 in general for a very long time, it was an awful architecture by comparison to the 6502, but the huge advantage (at the time) was the 20 bit address space and later the interchangeability for an upgrade path.
Sounds like my project, a 65C02 from WD. A simple system with banked memory (8K pages) up to 2M. Using an FPGA for all glue and will also be the graphics with HDMI out. Been so hot so far this year that all I managed to do was test the base system and write the hdl for the glue logic and bank switching :(
The monitor looks exactly like my first computer monitor with 16 colors. It was an XT, called Laxer. The computer had no hard drive. You needed to swap floppies. It came with the 5 inches soft drives and another drive for what they used to call me hard floppy disk 3M. I don't remember much.
Nicely done. I need to learn more about that microprocessor. If that's a VT-220 on your desk I am jealous. I used one of those for years at school and work and I miss it. Ah I see it's a 420, still a nice CRT.
I really want to do this with a Digital-Harris J11 Cpu. I feel the harder to find ICs are the most fun. It’s a 16bit process I’m sure can be hacked with. It’s just real hard to replace if the Indians start smoke signaling Nice video. It inspires me to be as organized with my spaghetti too.
@@TrackZeroFutzin yes. My friend Christian from Play With Junk channel. Sent me it from Switzerland. I don’t want to blow it up. I want to make it functional. Thanks for your feedback.
Interesting stuff! I like seeing unfinished project like these just as much as "finished" projects. Where did you get the PCB for the card? I was looking for blank ISA cards before but only found very very expensive ones. Seems like the best way is do design and order my own. Shouldn't be that hard. But still I'm surprised that nobody is offering them for a reasonable price.
Those are actually Apple II prototyping cards! I believe those are 50-pin while 8-bit ISA is 64-pin (don't quote me). The slot on the board is actually 64-way, but it has a bit of plastic jammed into one end to make sure I have the 50-pin card lined up correctly.
@@TrackZeroFutzin Thanks for the response! I realise they are different. And I'm looking for a universal 16 bit ISA card anyway. I was just wondering if there is a shop for prototype cards like this that I haven't found yet. Or maybe everybody who doesn't want to make their own pays 60 to 150 € for one of the cards I did find. It's not important. I'll just design my own I guess. It will be a lot cheaper.
If I wanted to make a 386pc from scratch. What would I need for components. Is that a simple diy soldering mission? Good around the assembly process just don't know what cheap parts are needed to try it out.
I wonder - maybe you know - is it possible to have similar project fully open-sourced - including ICs? That way it can be replicated even if chip manufacturer decide to stop production of ICs, which are used in computer. I know that it is not easy to fabricate your own IC, even if you have all sources, but I hope that it will change someday. PCB production was not much available for a long time too.
Hi there, can I somewhere find the schematic if I wanted to try it myself ? I worked on PIC16F84 microcontroller PC but I want something better, I would like to make myself this circuit 🙏🙏 Thanks
I needed to program some 16V8 glue logic a couple of years ago and used ABEL and IspLever... really enjoyed it and it seemed preferable to WinCUPL which some people use. You have a fun project there although very off piste!
I don't know if you've watched any of the recent streams, but I'm using 16V8s and CUPL for another project right now. This is pretty funny, because I use zero of the actual syntactic sugar features of either CUPL or ABEL and just write straight-up boolean expressions so to me there's hardly any difference between the two languages
There has never been a better time to learn electronics and microcontrollers. My first computer was an Elf II in '78. A cheap scope was something under $500 in those days, llke paying probably $2000 today. This for 10-20MHz bandwidth and two channels if you were lucky. Nobody had a logic analyzer, if you could afford the $200+, you could own a logic probe that coukd tell you hi, low or pulse with no metrics. My Elf kit cost over $100. Now, for under $100, youncan get a comply Arduino dev kit with scores of sensors. For $800 now, you can get a four channel MSO that can be easily hacked to 350MHz bandwith, that samples at 8GS/S, contains two arbitrary waveform generators, unbelievable triggering options, massive memory depth and protocol decoders for virtually anything serial. It also has a logic analyzer built in, but you have to buy the "probe" thingy. Back in the early 2000s, I crammed up on Pics and AVR, but went the Pic road at first. Switched to AVR when rhe arduino appeared and i could wrote in C, without paying Keil a fortune. Now i like ARM Cortex with the Pi Pico really drawingy interest due to the IOP coprocessor, thats an interesting device. My intro to ARM was with cheap olimex SAMD and LPC Arm7/tdmi using OpenOCD and an Olimex JTAG. It was so flakey, but i was able to bring up the boards at max clock speed and drive all the on onboard peripherals, using gcc and a CRT.S file i created. I learned so much and the board and OCD jtag debugger cost under $100 total back then, now you can get a bluepill and stlink programmer for like $5 total.
Good work. I have a question though. Do you plan on putting something on your walls? The room gives this hospital vibe, when sounds are being bounced back and forth.
I don't know about you, but I actually have more fun doing projects than completing them. I made a mistake "finishing" my Z-80 computer and got depressed just after it.
