How do CPUs read machine code? — 6502 part 2
Hi folks,
Here’s part 2 of my series on building a 65c02-based computer. The plan is to release this on Saturday. I’m planning a few minor tweaks before releasing. As always, I appreciate any feedback you can provide or other thoughts you might have.
[edit: I finalized the thumbnail & title]
I’m also still working out what the thumbnail and title will be. An unfortunate reality of YouTube (or really any platform where viewers choose what to watch) is that high-quality videos aren’t good enough on their own if no one clicks on them in the first place. It’s always a challenge to come up with a compelling thumbnail and title that isn’t misleading or interpreted as deceptive. It’s particularly challenging for this video, which is part 2 of a longer series. I have a few ideas I’m considering. I’m also open to suggestions on how to best tease what’s compelling about this video.
A lot of my time since the last video was spent figuring out how to scale up production of the 6502 project kits that turned out to be quite a bit more successful than I expected. We finally—this week—shipped all the kits that folks ordered after I announced them in the last video, so I’m feeling a lot better not having the stress of all those open orders. It was definitely a good problem to have, but it sure was a stressful problem! If you wanted a 6502 kit and were holding off because they were backordered, now is the time to order, before this video is released on Saturday. We have lots of stock right now, but it’s hard to predict what will happen after the video goes live (I plan to add a promo for the kits to the video).
As always, I appreciate any feedback on the video, and really appreciate your support that allows me to put the time into making this content.
Thanks,
-Ben
Comments (21)
Hi Ben, you are my first Sign up on Patreon, thank you for these videos, like Jason above, I really wish I hadnt sold off my BBC Micro collection...... hey ho, maybe I will re-create one using this series as a springboard.....
A wonderfully entertaining video - makes me long for my VIC-20 and the machine language monitor cartridge that took me years to figure out as a teen (the documentation was a little cryptic), I have got to build me one of these!
Just wanted to say that at 24:00, the video quality of the W64C22 pin layout really went down quite a bit. The text of the individual pins is extremely pixelated. Note that the rest of the picture at the point looks fine, including the Figure 3-1 caption as well as your hand!
Alas, that's what it looks like in the datasheet from WDC. Not much I can do (short of redrawing it from scratch... which... don't tempt me..... must... release... video...)
Great video series. Huge fan. Been wanting to experiment with making a 6502-based mini computer for a little while and then this series popped up. Great timing!
The audio is really low level for me, I had to triple my sound level to be able to hear it. Otherwise, good video! Youtube glitched, everything is fine now.
There is a strange audio at 21:59. Something like "if you place this for starters"...
Another awesome video, thanks Ben! When talking about the use of the 0x6000 address range for i/o I instantly understood the PC 640k barrier a lot better. I also had flashbacks of years of messing around with jumper settings and memory managers, thanks for that. :) "24K ought to be enough for anybody." -Ben Eater
Another winner, Ben! You've really got enough great stuff in there for two solid, worth-the-money videos, IMHO. Not that I'm complaining... :-) And that breadboarding is, as usual, a beautiful sight to behold.
Oh, and if you were thinking of a screencap for the thumbnail, around 45:39 would be cool. (Maybe crop out the clock?) You've got colorful circuitry, plus blinkenlights with a finger pointing to them to really draw the eye in.
Hey Ben- Great video (so far!). Just thought I'd interrupt my own watching to let you know there's a weird audio overlay artifact at minute 22 (almost exactly 22:00). I'll keep watching and send additional feedback if I've got any.
Hi Ben. Another great video. May I suggest to add Arduino code for programming the EEPROM in the File section (together with the 6502-monitor.ino). Some may not be familiar with Python and I am one of them. Title maybe "Interfacing with the Real World".
Yeah, I'll include the Python code from the video and probably also the raw EEPROM images to download when I release the video.
Ben, really love this video, enjoying this series immensely! Congratulations, this must be an absolute load of work, and you make it look effortless. I do have a thought about 'saying hex numbers out loud'... when, for example, you code the first LDA opcode with an immediate value of 0x42 (which is obviously a great choice!) you call that number 'forty-two'. Could that be confusing for some folks? I've heard it said that hex numbers should be said out loud as a digit string ('four two') to avoid this confusion. Same with 'address eight thousand' for 0x8000, and so on. Be interested in views on this - I increasingly have to teach this stuff in my job and recently caused a lot of confusion when I loosely referred to '0x10' as 'ten' and it took me a while to see why this caused a muddle. Keep up the excellent output! Always a great day when I see one of your videos in my feed.
If you're looking for thumbnail suggestions, mine would be to have one thumbnail background for the series with a different text caption for each episode, maybe to one side. This one would be "Machine Code, EPROM Programming, I/O". For the thumbnail background I'd suggest a cartoon-y 6502 chip or something like that. I'd offer to make one for you, but I can't draw to save my life!
Really good video! That semicolon sticks out like a sore thumb to me though...
Do you mean the unbalanced parentheses? Yeah, I figure there will be lots of people yelling at the screen until I fix it, but that's how programming goes—at least for me—so it seemed fine to leave it. Or were you talking about something else?
Thanks for the heads up on the kits, I forgot to order one before.
Just received the kit yesterday and populated the board I made. Will have to watch this later
FYI: You have some double dialog around 21:58 in the video.
Thank you (and others) for catching that! Once I post a video, there's no way to change it, so I really appreciate you catching it now.