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Microprocessor Board Plans for Old School CPUs: 6502, Z80, 6809, etc.
- krallja 5y agoI will occasionally see a (constructed) one of these kits pop up on eBay for $100+. Has anyone here bought or built one? Where did you get the parts?
- cguess 5y agoIf you want to build your own 6502 this is a great kit with amazing tutorials. He sells all the parts, but you can also source your own from Adafruit or whatever easily https://eater.net/6502 https://eater.net/6502
- Teknoman117 5y agoOne of the big things about Ben Eater's kits is that all the parts he uses in his videos are still in production. Other CPUs from that era are super interesting (Motorola 6800, 6809, the 68000, etc., Intel 8086, etc.), but they are no longer produced, so building systems requires sourcing new-old-stock or e-waste pulls from places like eBay, AliExpress, utsource, and so on. Eventually there will be no more of them. I believe the only CPUs from that era still being manufactured are modern CMOS variants of the Z80, 6502, and 65816. Their clock rates are 10-20x what they were in the late 70's / early 80's.
- krallja 5y ago68K’s are still produced by Rochester Electronics; they are still used in some embedded systems (allegedly automotive systems?), which is good news for kit builders!
- Teknoman117 5y agoI'd never bumped into them before, interesting. Are you referring to this: https://www.rocelec.com/news/motorola-6800 https://www.rocelec.com/news/motorola-6800 ?
- krallja 5y agoI was talking about the 68k, not the 6.8k, but that’s very exciting news to me! Love it when a vintage chip reenters production.
- Teknoman117 5y agoThe tail end of that article mentions the 68000 based products. Unfortunately looking up the part numbers for the reproduced ones on digikey has them marked as obsolete.
- krallja 5y agoBen Eater kickstarted this whole hobby into my brain! I’m (hopefully) starting a 68010 breadboard computer this summer; already have the parts, just need to find the time. Another fun (soldering) kit-maker is Lee Hart at sunrise-ev.com. His kits are always surprising in their cleverness yet understandability. Almost all of them have a 9600 baud serial port, yet no ACIA/UART in sight!
- tyingq 5y agoTindie.com is also a good source for some of these, sometimes with parts included.
- vertnerd 5y agoIf the vendor is kswichit then I believe it is produced by Wichit Sirichote himself. I purchased a 6502 constructed board on eBay a couple of years ago, then followed up by purchasing four more directly from Sirichote himself. I used the boards to teach a series of short, introductory courses in CPU architecture and programming and the boards have worked flawlessly. I was prompted to post the link today when I realized what a saint the guy is and how he needs more recognition.
- shdon 5y agoIs that URL working for people? I get an NXDOMAIN result.
- ______-_-______ 5y agoWorked for me just now. You can also see it archived: https://archive.is/IPfVP https://archive.is/IPfVP
- shdon 5y agoHm, since that link didn't work for me either, I switched my DNS from Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 to Google's 8.8.8.8 and that allowed me to view the page. Some weirdness going on there.
- runnerup 5y agoCEO of Cloudflare addressed this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317
- jwr 5y agoSame here. Cloudflare DNS doesn't seem to resolve it.
- runnerup 5y agoCEO of cloudflare addressed this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317
- naikrovek 5y agoI built the 8086 kit from him mid-2020, and it was a simple enough kit to put together. I had intended to use it to learn x86 assembly, and I did, but due to who I am as a person I got distracted by another project and moved on. I did learn some assembly and I think a skilled person could make any of these boards do useful work, though probably not very power-efficient work.
- vertnerd 5y agoI purchased five of his 6502 boards, assembled, to teach some programming classes and they have been wonderful. I only just stumbled on this full list of his work today and was blown away by how much he has done and I'm incredibly grateful that he has shared it with the world. If you get a chance to purchase something from him or use his designs I promise you won't be disappointed.
- whartung 5y agoThese are all nice. But at the same time, they're (mostly) representative of the bulk of the 8-bit scene. They only go so far. Ben Eater demonstrates what it takes to get a 6502 up on a breadboard (and, with the modern processors and RAM, it's not a whole lot). In the Z80 world, there's dozens of little Z80 systems with a UART and a flash drive booting CP/M in all sorts of form factors. But that's where it stops. There isn't anyone going full boat with a comparable 8-bit video system. The primary question of folks looking at these things, or wanting to do one themselves, is "how do I do video". They all want memory mapped video. Many want color and sprites. But even skipping color, something akin to a TRS-80 and it's 64x16 screen on a hacked TV set. Or the PET or Apple 40x24 B&W characters. Forget graphics and color and lines. How about "hello world"? I mean, Woz did it with paperclips and shiny gum wrappers, at least so I'm told. That's where things go off the deep end. It's like there's these simple baby steps to get to a UART, but video? That's...just not in the cards. Ben Eater did a nice series on getting a VGA video signal using discrete components. It's really informative. Demonstrably video is very difficult. Apparently anyone that can decipher a tool like KiCad can come up with a 8-Bit processor and a UART. But nobody, anywhere, is doing video. The few that are doing anything are these retro clones striving to duplicate C-64s, trying to step above the hobby market and break out with a commercial product. But even they struggle. I just find it curious how this last step seems so out of reach. The problem may simply be there's nothing to display video on. An 8-bit machine driving even a VGA monitor is asking an awful lot, and I don't know what it takes to convert composite video to run on a modern display, either a VGA or HDMI. I would think if someone came up with THAT circuit, composite in, VGA out, as a "black box", something the board designers could plug in to, like the old RCA boxes we used to use tuned to Channel 3, then maybe that's the breakthrough thats missing from the community. They they could fall back on the old composite circuits from that past.
- zh3 5y agoSurprised to see this as a barrier, it's not hard to generate composite video in hardware/software and there's plenty of composite to VGA/HDMI converters out there (e.g. search Amazon for "composite to HDMI"). I've written plenty of code for PIC micros that generates full-colour PAL/NTSC signals (text and graphics); have to think a bit about how to make it memory-mapped from an 8-bit MCU, some sort of cycle-stealing approach seems feasible (brute-force approach would be to use dual-port RAM or an FPGA, but that doesn't seem in the spirit of 8-bit retro hacking).