Ben Eater

I'm reposting this because, for some reason, Patreon didn't charge for it when I posted it the first time. I will try to suppress notifications, but apologies for the noise either way. I've been working with Patreon and they apparently can't fix the issue with the previous post, but I don't believe

This video is a bit of a continuation from my last video. At the end of the last video, I mentioned wanting to be able to print a string to the LCD using a single BASIC instruction. That required figuring out how to extract a string (or other expression). Not knowing much about the way BASIC worked

New video! In this one, I modify the Microsoft BASIC code that's running on the 6502 computer to add some new instructions. Specifically, I add instructions for printing to and manipulating the LCD screen that's already part of the computer. As always, thanks for your support and let me know if anyt

New year? New video! I'm finally getting around to videos about getting MS Basic running on the 6502 computer, and this is the first of what will probably be two parts about porting MS Basic and getting it working. As always, thanks for your continued support of these videos and please let me know i

Well you asked for it. After my last video there was a lot of interest in delving deeper into the Wozmon code and explaining how it works. So here you go! I walk through the code line-by-line explaining how it works and some of the tricks Woz used to get it to fit in the 250-byte constraint. As alwa

Here I demonstrate Wozmon, the hex monitor software that shipped on the Apple 1 computer running on my breadboard 6502. The video mostly shows what Wozmon is capable of without too much time spent on how it works or precisely what I had to do to get it working. Perhaps if there's interest in that, I

Here's a new video in the 6502 series. It's software for the 6551 UART serial interface. Unfortunately this chip from WDC has a hardware bug that has to be worked around. It's not ideal, but not too terrible. With the conclusion of this video, it's now very easy to read and write data from the seria

As promised in the last video, here's a look at the 6551 UART and how to interface it with the rest of the 6502 computer. This video only covers the hardware aspect. Perhaps I rambled a bit too much, but it was starting to get long and figured it would make sense to break out actually programming th

In this video, I explain the operation of a Dickson charge pump, which is a simple and clever way to double (or otherwise multiply) a voltage. Charge pumps like this are typically used in low-power systems (like computers) when one part of the circuitry uses different voltage levels from another. Fo

So, um... I saw this recent video by Technology Connections about a bizarre device from the 90s that attempts to censor bad language on TV. For some reason, I was compelled to learn more, found one cheap on eBay, and took it apart. Perhaps you'll enjoy the journey as much as I did? As always, thanks

New video? Yes! It's been a while... But I'm getting back to the 6502 computer with plans to add a serial interface, which will allow for a ROM monitor and ultimately a more functional computer. Anyhow, this video gets started by looking at the electrical and timing characteristics of the RS232 prot

Hey everyone, I'm still working on some tweaks for the hardware timer video, so I still haven't published that on YouTube yet. But last week, as you may know, Facebook's entire service was offline for about five hours. The explanations that came out talk about DNS and BGP as somehow related to the o

I've gotten a few requests for videos about different communication protocols, so here's a video about a communication protocol! SPI is one of the simplest IC-to-IC protocols. I explain the protocol and show it in action between the 6502 computer and a temperature sensor. As always, thanks for your

New video! I dissected a keyboard that supports n-key rollover to figure out how it works. It was fun figuring out how to capture the USB signals from this keyboard since it only wanted to talk at 480Mbps, which is way too fast to capture. Fortunately I found a way to do it and it turned out to be p

New video! What happens when you first plug a USB device in? There's a whole lengthy conversation where the computer discovers what a USB device is capable of. In this video I capture the conversation for a keyboard and walk through what's going on. As always, thanks for your support. Capturing that

This is sort of a continuation of my other videos on keyboards, but really it's more of an exploration of the low level operation of USB. Hope you find it interesting! As always, let me know if you see any bits that are confusing or wrong, and thanks again for your support! -Ben How does a USB keybo

Here's the final video... finally. Sorry this took longer to get to and finish up than I'd hoped. But thanks to everyone's feedback, I tried to clarify the circular buffer a bit. And I added a whole section on using the keyboard flags to handle the shift key. In the end it's pretty fun to play with.

EDIT: This is now the final video and it's just the first part (hardware). I'll repost the software section as a separate patron video with the plan of expanding it a bit before releasing it. Hello patrons! Here's the logical next step after my last video: Connecting a keyboard to the 6502 computer.

New video! Here's a video where I poke around with the signals generated by a PS/2 keyboard and build a very basic—and somewhat impractical—circuit to decode them. I also discuss a few different options for how one might interface a keyboard to a computer. As always, thank you for your support and p

Hey everyone, Happy New Year! Here's a video that's been frequently requested for quite some time: The techniques I use to make tidy-looking breadboard projects. Not much technical content in here, but definitely let me know if anything is confusing or unclear. And thanks, as always, for your contin

Hey everyone, Here's a draft [edit: now final] of the conclusion to hooking up the "video card" to the 6502 computer! There are a few more things I'd like to add, but this is the bulk of what I'm planning to release in a week or so. As always, any feedback or errors you catch are appreciated! Thanks

Well here it is: This is perhaps my most-often requested video! Everyone seems to want to see me take the breadboard “video card” I made and hook it up to a breadboard computer. So here we go! I'm planning to release this video in about a week, so any feedback is greatly appreciated. I'm also going

Hi everyone and thanks, as always, for your continued support! Here's the next video in the 6502 series. Here I build on some of what I discussed about how the IRQ pin works and use the 6522 versatile interface adapter to trigger an interrupt when we press a button, and then discuss how the 6502 ser

Hi everyone, Here's a preview of my next video. This one's a bit of a departure from the 6502 project I've been working on, though fear not, I'll be back to that with the next video. In some sense this is a continuation of the error detection and correction mini-series I did a while back. But the re

Here's a preview of my next video! This one's an intro to interrupts and the difference between how the IRQ line and NMI line work on the 6502. As always, any feedback is appreciated. I'm planning to release this on Saturday. Thanks again for your support -Ben Hardware interrupts (YouTube)

Here's a draft of my next video! I originally expected to make a video interrupts. But as I got into planning it out, I wanted a simple way to count how many interrupts had occurred. That part was easy enough, but then came the question of displaying the number. Well somehow the process of explainin

Here's the next in the 6502 series. As always, any feedback is appreciated before this goes public this weekend. In other news, it's been an incredibly busy month for me. This video nearly didn't happen this month. Much of my time was spent helping out behind the scenes with 3blue1brown's lockdown m

I'm upgrading the 6502 computer to use a 1Mhz oscillator in place of the slow clock module we've been using. In this video, I take a deep dive into the special considerations of high-speed signals on a breadboard. As always, let me know if you spot any issues or have any suggestions. I plan to relea