Comment by amelius
Comment by amelius 13 hours ago
How do I build a 6502 from just the elements?
Comment by amelius 13 hours ago
How do I build a 6502 from just the elements?
If I scavenge any machine today, how likely would I be to find a 6502 vs something more modern? I’d argue that some people might have a NES at home and one could get a 2A03 from it, but in a hypothetical scenario where I need to scavenge some computational power, I’d find an Android phone
I have ported zForth to an even weaker chip, the famous 10c risc-v micro ch32v003 (16k flash, 2k ram) so no issue running on this: https://github.com/BogdanTheGeek/zForth
Allow me to brag about romforth (https://github.com/romforth/romforth) which I ported to the "3c" Padauk and can run on really small rom/ram microcontrollers. Caveats: - tested only on an emulator SDCC/ucsim_pdk, not on real hardware - given how small the ram is, there is no user dictionary but new words can be defined and tested using what the Forth folks refer to as "umbilical hosting".
You're much more likely to stumble one something more modern, but that modern something is also much less repairable. It's great if it works and if it can run Linux or Dusk OS, but when it can't, you're out of luck.
With a 6502 or other such CPU, the machines you scavenge them from are much more repairable and adaptable. You can use those components like lego blocks. It breaks? either repair it or strip the working parts to use in another frankenstein computer.
You begin by making a pen "from just the elements", then work your way up to there.
In other words, it's a huge challenge, but 6502 is closer, in complexity, to the pen than to the, say, AMD Ryzen.
But the primary idea behind Collapse OS isn't to run from 6502 built from the ground up (although it partly is), but to run from frankenstein cobbled up machines made from scavenged parts.