For a very long time, I used to be a little bit of a Z80 snob, I’ve to confess. “That 6502 solely has 3 registers and a single accumulator! How will you get something completed with so little working area?” I might say to 6502 followers. Effectively, I began to grasp final 12 months once I started writing an meeting language program for my Commodore 64. The constraints and adaptability of the 6502 are what attraction to followers, and now once I see boards just like the rosco_6502 r4 package I get very tempted to choose one up!
The rosco (which stands for Actually Previous-Faculty Firm) board is a reasonably beefy 6502 single-board laptop, with 528 kB of RAM, 8 kB of ROM (expandable to 32 kB) and a strong XR68C681 twin UART for many I/O. It’s a completely through-hole design, so it’s pretty simple to place collectively, and it comes with an awesome serial monitor that permits full management of the processor. SD card help is included, in addition to a bootloader that means that you can load .hex recordsdata over the serial port for straightforward testing!
It’s also possible to pull the EEPROM and program it instantly when you select, providing you with full management of your complete board, from the boot course of onward. A easy FTDI dongle gives energy and serial information when debugging, however there’s additionally a barrel jack to energy the board when you want extra present. It’s utilizing a real WDC 65C02, the extra fashionable CMOS variant of the chip. This makes interfacing it with fashionable boards and programs a snap. There’s additionally a full breakout header giving entry to the CPU bus, so you may add your personal peripheral playing cards and create one thing really distinctive.
Should you’ve ever needed to offer the 6502 a severe strive, the rosco_6502 board seems to be like an awesome place to get began!
