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[Osgeld] is showing off what he calls a sanity check. It's the first non-breadboard version of his Pocket Serial Host. He's been working on the project as a way to simplify getting programs onto the Apple II he has on his "retro bench". When plugged in, the computer sees it as a disk drive. The storage is provided by an SD card which is hidden on the underside of that protoboard. This makes it … [Read more...]
Evern wanted to write your own Atari 2600 games? This won't get you quite that far, but it will teach you the very basics. It's an assembly tutorial for the 6502 processor. The nice thing is that you need nothing more than your browser to participate thanks to the embedded JavaScript emulator which acts as assembler, machine, and debugger in one. The 6502 was in a lot of early equipment. In … [Read more...]
This is a microscopic photograph of an 8085 processor die. [Ken Shirriff] uses the image in his explanation of how the ALU works. It is only capable of five basic operations: ADD, OR, XOR, AND, and SHIFT-RIGHT. [Ken] mentions that the lack of SHIFT-LEFT is made up for by adding the number to itself which has the effect of multiplying a number by two; the same mathematical function performed by … [Read more...]
[Michael Mitchell] put together a demonstration of how Google Talk can be used to communicate with scripts. Although the concept isn't new we haven't seen very many projects that use the chat interface for issuing commands and receiving data. The one that does come to mind is this home automation project which uses Google Talk because it's quite a bit faster than SMS or email … [Read more...]
The latest update in the Veronica 6502 computer project is this finalized VGA board which now has a home in the machine's backplane. We've been glued to the updates [Quinn Dunki] has been posting about the project for many months now. Getting the GPU working proved to take quite a bit of time, but we learned a ton just by following along. The video output had humble beginnings way back in … [Read more...]
[Zak] wanted to keep tabs on his network connection without needing to log into his router. Since his router was a PC running Debian Linux, he rigged up a Bluetooth Network Monitor to display the information. The monitor is based on a ATMega328P that reads data from a Bluetooth serial connection and displays it on the TFT screen. It uses a low cost Bluetooth module to receive data from a … [Read more...]
[Quinn Dunki] pulled together many months worth of work by interfacing her GPU with the CPU. This is one of the major points in her Veronica project which aims to build a computer from the ground up. We've seen quite a number of posts from her regarding the AVR-powered GPU. So far the development of that component has been happening separately from the 6502 centered CPU. But putting them … [Read more...]
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