Shuffling bits for fun and profit(?) Last time, we got the F18A physically repaired and running off Veronica’s power supply. Things seemed to be working okay, and I could [more]
One step back, two steps forward. If you’ve been following this Put-An-F18A-In-Veronica drama, you know that we had some very light early successes, followed by an emotional rollercoaster of [more]
THIS IS FINE. After the incredible success of our last bit of work on Veronica’s F18A, I was very excited to get started on the software to talk to [more]
Do not go gentle into that good night. Just when things were starting to go really well on the Put An F18A In Veronica plan, well, I fried an [more]
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. With our recent success in remembering how to do address decoding, it was time to look at the [more]
Bridging The Gap As you probably know if you’re the kind of person who follows this blog, the 6502 CPU (the 1970s chip around which Veronica is based) talks [more]
Time for our girl to learn some new tricks. If you were to ask me what questions I get asked the most in my life, the list might look [more]
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]