I’ve been toying with the idea of building a 6502-based (or rather, 65C02-based) computer for a few years now. I was inspired by Ben Eater‘s YouTube series about it. I bought a bunch of chips from Mouser, and every so often I’d think about how to do this or that for the notional computer. Well, finally I’ve decided to build one.

I’ve made some changes from Ben’s design. I’m using CPLD‘s for address decoding, an 8k ROM instead of 32k (but I can adjust the address decoding to support up to 32k ROM), 64k RAM (not all addressable due to ROM and I/O), 4 65C22 VIA’s, and a 4 MHz clock. So far I’ve added a 20×4 character LCD, a YM3812 (OPL2) sound chip, and a NES controller. I have plans to add a PS/2 keyboard, an SD card reader, upgrade the clock frequency to 8 MHz, upgrade the OPL2 to an OPL3, and add a composite video display using the TMS9918A video chip.

I’ll make a bunch of posts in the future about various technical topics related to this, but I wanted to start with this general post introducing the project.