Quick Update

I'm currently in the midst of college applications, but have still managed to get some work done on my computer. Some long awaited parts came today, including the 2mhz crystal, R65C02, R65C22, 6821 andAT28C64. This rounds out the parts list for the first computer for now, so now a first run is just a matter of hooking up some data busses and burning the ROM.

I've also disassembled an LCD interface I was trying to build for the replica 1, and repurposed it into the EEPROM programmer. It is based on this design, a very simple one chip hack. On first power up, I put in a ram chip to test it, wrote $AA to a memory location and it read back! It's always great having a design work on the first try. I then tried writing $FF, and it read back as $BF. Darn.. A quick calculation showed the D6 line wasn't working, and I found the problem in a bad connection to the IDE header. Everything is now working great. I'm going to burn in the little program on the First Great 6502 Project page to make sure my I/O chip is working. After that I'm going to try to modify the Woz monitor to run with the 6551, and things will really be rolling.

I'll upload some more pictures tomorrow. I also have some interesting ideas for handling a matrix keyboard easily in hardware without tying up too many resources. A description of that should come tomorrow or the next day as well.

If everything goes well, I could have a running computer in the next few days.



Thanks for reading!

EDIT: Looks like someone over on the Briel Computers forum beat me to converting the Woz Mon to serial. I’ll reassemble this instead.