Laptop Based on 6502 CPU

(maddox.pro)

39 points | by nanochess 3 days ago

10 comments

  • burner420042 1 minute ago
    "Getting it to at least run BASIC" is a common theme with DIY enthusiasts. Why is that?
  • flopsamjetsam 1 hour ago
    https://codeberg.org/TechPaula/LT6502b

    Specs:

    * 65C02 running at 10MHz

    * 46KByte of user RAM

    * EhBASIC 22p2 with custom extensions

    * eWOZMON

    * Compact Flash for storage

    * Built in battery (7400mAh currently)

    * USB-PD Rechargable

    * 10.1" Screen with 1024x600 and 256 colours

    * WiFi Modem (based on this - https://github.com/dhansel/WifiModem)

    * nanoSwinSID for sound (as well as beeps)

  • donpdonp 57 minutes ago
    Very interesting project. It'd be nice to see video of it in action and what use cases the author had in mind. A pic in a different post shows the 48k ram chip, and not far away is an SD card of 1 gigabyte - that's a dramatic contrast. The storage can hold the contents of ram 21,845 times over. If an 8GB laptop today had the equivalent storage, it would be a disk of 174TB.

    Browsing by tag 'lt6502b' gives other posts that have pictures of the motherboard. https://www.maddox.pro/?cat=65 (update: the codeberg link has all the relevant pics)

    • Rohansi 35 minutes ago
      The 6502 can't actually address more than that. The flash controller built into modern SD cards are also going to be significantly more powerful than the 6502. And I'm surprised you can even buy SD cards that small still!
      • skissane 5 minutes ago
        > The 6502 can't actually address more than that.

        Unless you use bank switching, which historically a lot of 6502 machines did use (e.g. Apple III/IIe/IIc, BBC Master 128, Commodore 128, Commodore CBM-II, etc)

    • doubled112 33 minutes ago
      That's a CompactFlash card. You often see them used in places where an IDE drive would have been.
  • Neywiny 1 hour ago
    What an interesting layout for a mobile site. It had the archive and a bunch of other stuff before the post. I thought OP linked something wrong.
  • system7rocks 8 minutes ago
    Here is what I get confused about...

    Surely a laptop prototype based on such a tested and well-worn CPU with 48K of RAM would be cool, but shouldn't it sip power? Like shouldn't it last for like months on a charge? Or am I revealing my very meager and outdated understanding of engineering with only a bachelor in computer science from like 2004?

    • oofbaroomf 0 minutes ago
      The display also takes power, quite a lot actually - 2-5W
  • discardable_dan 29 minutes ago
    This is a cool project. The AI banner looks awful.
  • weinzierl 1 hour ago
    Well, there was the Commodore SX 64. Not exactly lap sized but portable for sure.

    https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_SX-64

    • kstrauser 1 hour ago
      It weighed 23 pounds. It was approximately as portable as a tower PC. You could schlep one around, but it'd get heavy after a while.
  • user3939382 1 hour ago
    A 6502 is capable of most actual workloads people have, whose profiles actually haven’t changed much. Almost all of our compute goes to GUI and rendering stacks that decorate our actual work.
    • lukan 51 minutes ago
      Those people you speak of, how big are their numbers all in all you think? And is that a subgroup of a subgroup?

      Because most people I know certainly have different workloads and need their rendering as part of the work, not to decorate it nicely.

      But for keeping a distraction free digital diary, it might be a nice device.

  • debo_ 1 hour ago
    When I saw the domain name, I thought this might be:

    https://basharchive.org/#s/Maddox