Blondihacks

For the first time ever, our girl didn’t show up for work.   Veronica has been making the rounds of makerspaces, conferences, etc lately. She has been through more airports [more]

Quinn meets Hack-A-Day. Thousands dead. Film at eleven.   Let me open this post with a bit of administrative news. I’m now a Patreon Creator! For those of you who are [more]

Have 6502 Will Travel.   I wanted to let everyone know that I’ll be bringing Veronica to KansasFest this year. In addition to having the machine around for people to [more]

Booting into a useful state.   A common feature of 1980s computers is that they booted into a useful state. This was one of the main things that separated them [more]

Making Veronica fit for the open road.   One of my earliest goals for Veronica was to be able to take her places. Perhaps a Maker Faire, or a hackerspace [more]

Keyboards and gamepads and ports, oh my!   With Veronica’s input systems working in prototype form, it’s time to get it all installed in the case. The first step in [more]

Adventures with 40 year-old chip bugs.   It seems like every Veronica project I start is “a pretty straightforward thing that shouldn’t take too long”, which then turns into a [more]

Some Input to go with all that Output.   There are moments in a big project like this that really stand out. Those moments where it all seems to come [more]

Making RAM and EEPROM play nice together.   If you had told me ahead of time how much trouble the RAM board would cause, I would not have believed you. [more]

Just when you thought it was safe to call yourself Turing-complete.   Veronica seemed to be humming along nicely with her new RAM, and I was chugging away on her [more]

Minor growing pains.   Veronica has developed a minor problem. She’s outgrown her backplane! When I started this project, I thought a fair bit about how big I should make [more]

Making our girl Turing-complete.   It suddenly occured to me that Veronica is missing something rather important which is needed to be called a “computer”. RAM! With all the chaos [more]

Cross-developing on homebrew 6502s and other single board computer projects.   Over on Veronica, things have progressed to the point of needing some fairly substantial amounts of 6502 code to [more]

By popular demand.   Housekeeping Note: I’ve added a new column on the left that groups Veronica posts together. If you want to follow this entire project, they’re all there, [more]

Just when you thought it was safe to render.   If you recall from last time, I had Veronica’s GPU board all built, and successfully receiving sequences of commands from [more]

Making Veronica’s video permanent.   Now that the video board seems to be working, it’s time to make it a real PCB so it can be installed on Veronica’s backplane. [more]

It’s been a long time coming.   It’s been quite an odyssey getting to this point. One of the tougher challenges I’ve encountered so far on this project is setting [more]

Coding in style with open source tools.   I need to take a quick segue here to talk about the toolchain I’ve been using to write the GPU code for [more]

Getting the VRAM to play well with others.   The next step in getting Veronica’s VGA board up and running is setting up a way to share the contents of [more]

Taking stock and making plans.   Sometimes, in order to move forward, you have to take a step back. When last we met Veronica, she had a VGA signal generator [more]

Video memory for our girl.   I considered subtitling this article, “adventures in breadboard noise”, since that’s what I spent most of my time dealing with. In any case, let’s [more]

Bit-banging a VGA signal generator.   Computers aren’t very exciting until they have a display of some sort. Well, I suppose if you’re at Bletchley Park trying to crack Enigma [more]

A little something to keep the mice from eating Veronica’s wires.   Well, I finally got back to working on Veronica, but this project is less Steve Wozniak and more [more]

ROM board with built-in EEPROM programmer.   It seemed so simple. The best ideas always do. However, sometimes the smallest problems end up taking the most time to solve. There [more]

An onboard way to program an EEPROM, or fake one.   Well, now that Veronica is up and running in real hardware form, she needs some real ROM to play [more]

A real copper home for our girl.   Now that we have Veronica’s backplane mostly sorted, we have everything we need to move the 6502 itself off the breadboard and [more]

Time to get serious.   Well, Veronica is alive, and running code that we can put (very slowly) into memory. So far so good, but something has gotta give. It’s [more]

Real memory!   If you recall from last time, we got Veronica to perform a free run by NOP-ing her way through a phantom memory space.   Well, the next [more]

Veronica.   Now for something a little different. I was first exposed to computers back in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Suffice it to say, placing my hands on [more]