CBS6000 - an 8-bit 6510 computer

u/Dream of Omnimaga December 23, 2014, 10:08:28 PM

ROFL at that pic Streetwalrus.

Even in Keoni's pic I would have an hard time remembering what wire goes where and not accidentally desoldering the wrong one, even if I looked in front of the board.

u/Duke "Tape" Eiyeron December 23, 2014, 10:43:30 PM

You say that but when it comes to gigantic uncommented source code, you directly know what to do! :p

u/novenary December 23, 2014, 10:45:03 PM

I guess source code is easier to mess with than hardware.

u/Keoni29 December 24, 2014, 12:06:51 AM

Back in the days engineers did not have access to FPGA technology, so if they needed a custom chip and it was not made yet they built their own simulator board with loose chips and lots of wire. That's probably what that board is, Streetwalrus. I am not using colored wires, so yeah, there is a fair bit of probing and guessing involved in changing the wires around

Quote from: Eiyeron on December 23, 2014, 10:43:30 PM
You say that but when it comes to gigantic uncommented source code, you directly know what to do! :p

What I usually do is wire up all pins with long wire and bundle them up with labels on each bundle, so it was somewhat commented. Then I start soldering those wires to where they need to go.

Quote from: Streetwalrus on December 23, 2014, 10:45:03 PM
I guess source code is easier to mess with than hardware.

Sourcecode is definitely easier to mess with than hardware, but it can be a pain in the ass to discover software bugs. The hardware on this device was pretty straightforward (in my experience.)

I hooked up a little serial digital to analog converter to the serial port. I can play 256 byte long audio samples now (which is just long enough to generate clicks

). I will try to make the max length 65536 bytes tomorrow.

Last Edit: December 24, 2014, 12:14:11 AM by keoni29

u/Dream of Omnimaga December 24, 2014, 03:03:31 AM

Quote from: keoni29 on December 24, 2014, 12:06:51 AM
Back in the days engineers did not have access to FPGA technology, so if they needed a custom chip and it was not made yet they built their own simulator board with loose chips and lots of wire. That's probably what that board is, Streetwalrus. I am not using colored wires, so yeah, there is a fair bit of probing and guessing involved in changing the wires around

I wonder if that wasn't what they did with Space Invaders arcade machines at first?

u/Keoni29 December 24, 2014, 09:17:46 AM

I believe early arcade boards such as pong used discrete state-machines. Things like space-invaders probably used a cpu and some off-the-shelf video chip.

Computers like the C128 used many custom chips. Those were first build on large wirewrapped boards.

Last Edit: December 24, 2014, 09:24:00 AM by keoni29

u/Keoni29 December 24, 2014, 12:12:22 PM

Original post:
http://8times8.eeems.me:81/blog/?thread=12

Muhahahahahaha
The cbs6000 is making some noise! I hooked up a digital to analog converter to the serial port and wrote some software that plays back sound data in ram. Almost the entire first 64k bank is filled up for about 5 seconds worth of 8000 bytes/sec 8 bit audio.