Modern 6502

Summary

Modern 6502 Posted: March 27, 2016Updated: April 16, 2016 Introduction A few years ago while searching for electronic parts, I stumbled on the Western Design Center W65C02 processor. Even though it's in a DIP packaging, which makes it easy for a hobbyist like me to breadboard, it would still have required RAM and other chips to make it useful. Considering this chip was the first processor I learned to program on, the 6502 is more like a religious thing for me so I got two of them. I ended up mounting one of them on the side of the door at the entrance to my house for spiritual protection. A few years later while doing my daily hackaday.com reading, I discovered the W65C265SXB board, a modern microcontroller with a 6502 (actually 65C816) at its core. I did a really good job resisting buying one for a while, but eventually gave in. To put this board to use I decided to put up this page with 3 small projects (added a 4th more recently) to show off some things that can be done with this newer 6502 chip: LED Blinking (assembly) Music Playing (Java) Software SPI DAC Sound Player (assembly) More Tone Generator (assembly) Besides the 4 projects on this page, this board was also used this board to record and read data from audio cassettes on my Tape Data Recorder page and read chocolate data off a Swedish pancake on my PANCAKE-ROM page. There's also a W65C832 FPGA project on this site which is a 32 bit version of a 6502. So there are actually 4 SXB boards to choose from. I chose the 16 bit 65C816 based board since it can also run 8 bit 6502 programs in emulation mode. There is a version with a pure 6502 core too. This board is actually pretty loaded... 4 UARTs, lots of IO, 2 tone generators, and a ROM chip full of routines to make talking to the hardware simpler. Anyone wanting to play with the programs on this page should get the W65C265SXB board. The tools I used to assemble / compile / upload these programs are naken_asm, Java Grinder, and Joe Davisson's EasySXB. Need to ...