Neo6502 – the Open Source Hardware Modern Retro Computer got incredible development in March

Neo6502 developer community on Neo6502 Discord server grow and so the results. There are some incredible news.

UEXT

NeoBasic now have full control on UEXT connector and supports GPIO, I2C, SPI, ADC.

What does this means? You can use all available UEXT modules with Neo6502 and also all boards from other vendors who have I2C, SPI, UART interfaces! All this available from BASIC, Assembler, C or Pascal. This makes Neo6502 capable to do everything Arduino does (RetroDuino?) but have one major advantage – Neo6502 do not need host computer to develop, it has USB Keyboard and HDMI output, so you can write and run your code, also you can make fancy graphics and animations based on the sensor modules input. Something which Arduino can’t do without additonal shields for video and keyboard support.

Chris Garrett blogged about using Microchip MCP23017 to add 16 GPIO to Neo6502 with the new I2C commands.

and MOD-WIFI-ESP8266 to connect to the web:

Pascal-M

Pascal-M is the first pascal compiler which can run natively on Neo6502 so you can compile and run code on Neo, actually for the fun of it David Given run compilation of Pascal-M (which is also written in Pascal) with the Pascal-M compiler on Neo6502, the result (after hours of compilation) is completely working Pascal-M compiler 🙂

LLVM-MOS

Asie added Neo6502 target to official LLVM-MOS SDK GitHub repository so not we have second compiler option beside CC65.

GAMEPAD

The Neo6502 firmware now have USB support for USB-GAMEPAD

so you can play your games with NES style 12 buttons USB gamepad. The first game which was updated is PacMad from Bocianu

MOUSE

USB Mouse support is add to the Neo6502 firmware, this allow mouse to be used and it immediately was targeted as tool in the Graphics editor Bocianu is worning on which will allow natively on Neo6502 to make your sprites for Games!

MUSIC

Neil_555 is working to add 3 channel Music synthesizer and here is some preliminary music. The new synthesizer slows down Neo6502 with only 2.6% so nothing to worry about when we got nice music for games.

Here is sample music played on Neo6502.

More Products with plastic boxes

The USB-GIGABIT s a popular USB to Gigabit Ethernet converter. Until now, we only offered this product as a bare board, which created some problems when used.

Sometimes, if too much force was applied by mistake, the USB connector could break. With the new box, this problem is solved.

The Cerberus 2100 is the latest open source hardware design from The Byte Attic, aimed at the education sector. It features two processors: the 6502 and Z80. To learn more, please visit the Cerberus2100 project page and Facebook group.

Now, Cerberus2100 comes with a beautiful protective box.

USB-NeoHub the compatible with RP2040 USB hub also got protection box:

USB-NeoHub is USB 1.1 and USB 2.0 compliant Open Source Hardware Industrial 1:4 USB hub

The modern retro computer Neo6502‘s new firmware now supports USB Flash drives and USB keyboards. However, there seems to be an issue either with the RP2040 USB hardware or the TinyUSB. When a USB keyboard is connected directly to RP2040, it works fine. However, when the keyboard is connected via a USB hub, there is a high chance it will not work.

To add to the complexity, some keyboards work with any USB hub, and some USB hubs work with any keyboards. Unfortunately, in most cases, these cheap USB hubs, like the one we have on the web and many others, simply refuse to work. Out of the 10 USB hubs I bought to test, only 2 were functional. I’m not sure if this is a software bug with TinyUSB or an RP2040 USB physical incompatibility issue, but all these USB hubs work just fine with PCs or OLinuXino or Raspberry Pi Linux computers.

While searching online, I found that many other people have faced the same problem with RP2040.

Regardless, this was an annoying problem that needed to be solved! That’s why I conducted research to find a USB hub chipset that works seamlessly with Neo6502, leading to the creation of USB-NeoHub.

USB-NeoHub is 100% compatible with RP2040 USB and allows multiple USB peripherals to be connected to it. In the case of Neo6502, this includes a USB Flash drive along with a USB keyboard.

USB-NeoHub is industrial grade and operates from -40+85C

CPM65 porting progress for the Open Source Hardware Modern Retro Computer Neo6502

Neo6502 development continues at high speed, NeoBASIC very efficient tailored BASIC interpreter with special features for game development, CC65 C/C++ compiler, MadPascal – Turbo Pascal like compiler are available.

Lot of people have asked can CPM65 be also ported on it, so David Given took this challenge and as you can see from the picture above he posted on Neo6502 Discord developers server he is close to the goal 🙂

What CPM65 offers is: BASIC, vi-like Editor, Assembler, disk utilities etc.

With all these tools Neo6502 is becoming one of the most fun 6502 retro computers to work with.

I will post later how easy is to make Games with NeoBasic, Paul Robson made number of features which make it easy to handle events, sprites, keyboard, so to make something like this takes only 64 lines of code:

CERBERUS2100 the new educational multi-CPU, BASIC-programmable microcomputer from TheByteAttic is ready for ordering on the web!

CERBERUS 2100 is an Open Source Hardware and Software educational multi-processor 8-bit computer, featuring both Z80 and 6502 CPUs, plus an AVR processor as I/O controller. Built with CPLDs, CERBERUS 2100™ is fully programmable even with respect to its hardware, at the level of individual gates and flip-flops. It runs BASIC interpreters for both CPUs, but can also be used in a ‘bare metal’ mode through its built-in BIOS. It can even be extended through its expansion slot, which comes paired with a powerful, generic communications protocol that allows for Direct Memory Access (DMA). A detailed description of CERBERUS 2100™ is available in the Hardware Manual. And for the latest technical developments, you can join the developers’ group.

The initial batch of CERBERUS 2100 is assembled, tested and works as expected.

CERBERUS 2100 hardware is designed by Bernardo Kastrup a.k.a. TheByteAttic.

The 6502 BASIC is written by Alexander Sharikhin.

The Z80 BASIC is written by Dean Belfield.

FOSDEM 2024 – the conference is totally recovered after the Covid hard years

FOSDEM 2024, the largest Free Open Source Software and Hardware conference in Europe, took place from the 2nd to the 4th of February.

This was the first time I attended after the COVID madness. There were three consecutive years when I couldn’t participate. The best part of FOSDEM is meeting face-to-face with people you’ve only communicated with online throughout the year.

This year, people were back, and things were even crazier than usual. With hundreds of tracks and thousands of attendees, the rooms were available for only one day instead of two, and they were consistently full!

On the last day (Sunday), I had to present two talks in two different rooms, with just a 30-minute gap between them. This was in the late afternoon, with a flight just hours away 🙂

The FOSDEM video team is quick, and the talks will be online soon. In the meantime, I’ve uploaded my slides on Slideshare.

Electronic boards production automation with KiCAD scripts – where I spoke about how we reverse engineered the file formats for our PCB assembly line machines and now generate the programming files directly from KiCAD

and

Neo in the Matrix – where I spoke about Neo6502 the modern retro computer with W65C02 processor and RP2040 co-processor which cost only EUR 30 and runs almost x3 times faster from the popular retro computers with 6502 built recently and x20-30 times faster than the original retromachines from 1980s with 6502

Unfortunately, my plans to organize an Agon/Neo group meeting fell through. However, there’s good news – TuxCon 2024 is coming on the 11th-12th of May in Plovdiv, where we’ll have plenty of space and time to meet. Everyone is welcome! There are direct Ryanair flights from London and Manchester to Plovdiv. Alternatively, there are plenty of options to fly to Sofia and then move to Plovdiv by bus. TuxCon is completely free to participate in, and on Saturday evening after the talks, there is a traditional free beer event sponsored by the conference sponsors – something that none of the other conferences offer 😉

Not at least at TuxCon, you’ll have the opportunity to meet some of the people who made AgonLight and Neo6502 possible.

Did you ever hear for Mad-Pascal? Now you can program Neo6502 with this 32-bit Turbo-Pascal for Atari XL/XE compiler

Processed By eBay with ImageMagick, z1.1.0. ||B2

Turbo Pascal was one of the most popular languages back in 1980s. Written entiarly in Assembler and capable to compile thousands of program lines per second on old slow machines it was genuine masterpiece of software.

I didn’t know until recently that there is version for 6502 named Mad-Pascal. I read about it in Neo6502 discord channel, where Wojciech Bociański (bocianu) posted Mad-Pascal library for Neo6502

https://fujinet.pl/neo6502/neo6502.html

and his pull request to mad-pascal repository which is already merged

https://github.com/tebe6502/Mad-Pascal/pull/129

So now you can program Neo6502 like this:

program hello;
uses crt;
var c:char;
    s:TString;
begin
    TextBackground(10);
    TextColor(15);
    ClrScr;

    Writeln('Hello Neo6502!');
    Writeln('This time in Mad-Pascal.');
    Writeln;
    
    s:='Enter your name:';
    Writeln(s);
    Readln(s);
    Writeln('Hi ',s,'!');
    Writeln;
    Writeln('Press any key to return to basic');
    Readkey;
    TextBackground(0);
    TextColor(2);
    ClrScr;
    asm jmp $800 end;    
end.

I’m impressed 🙂

More code for Neo6502 in Pascal is here

Neo6502 Open Source Hardware Retro Computer NeoBasic gets in shape for Game development and more!

Neo6502 the EUR 30 W65C02 based Open Source Hardware modern Retro Computer with HDMI, USB Keyboard interface got it’s own BASIC language made by Paul Robson – the man behind a lot of 6502 projects on the net!

For a long time Neo6502 users could only play Apple ][ and Oric-Atoms games running in emulation mode, but the original NeoBasic written by Paul Robson specially for Neo6502 becomes more and more useful with every day.

Paul Robson not only have excellent ideas, but also it quite well organized and documents well what he is doing. You can check the documentation for the BASIC language , the Neo6502 API, Memory Map, etc. something which is mostly skipped in other projects as being “boring stuff”.

Although W65C02 in Neo6502 runs on only humble 6.25 Mhz this brief comparison show that the “magic” Paul Robson does to offload 6502 with activities where the processor is not good at to RP2040 gives great results. For instance Multiplication, Division, Float Point Arithmetic, Moving Sprites, loading graphics is all delegated to RP2040. The major advantage for Neo6502 architecture toward the others is that all the RAM is inside RP2040 and the SD-CARD/USB Flash drives are also directly accessible by RP2040, so 6502 only have to “give commands” to RP2040 and not move any data to it. This makes the Neo6502 very efficient.

Here is comparison of Neo6502 and some other Retro Computers:

As you can see Neo6502 at 6.25Mhz is right behind Acorn A3010 (ARM250@12Mhz) and AgonLight (Z80@18.434Mhz) outperforming CommanderX16 which runs on 8Mhz and have FPGA co-processor.

Compared to the old Retro Machines from the ’80s like Acorn BBC B, Commodore 64 and even HP with 68000@8Mhz Neo6502 just outperform them x10-20 times!

To see how efficient NeoBasic has become just see the Galaxians written in NeoBASIC in just 134 Lines of code:

Comparing new 6502 machine with Commander X16 is unavoidable as this is probably most popular 6502 project on the net. Here is LINE DRAW BASIC demo made on Commander X16 and on Neo6502:

If you want to join the development you can join the Neo6502 Discord developer’s chat server

OpenFest 2023 – Soldering workshop and Retro computer gaming

Day 1 at OpenFest we had the traditional Soldering workshop. We do these since 2012 and everyone already know about them, so many people were waiting with anticipation to come and solder their boards.

There were many new people though – about 80% of all people who participated soldered for very first time!

Sometimes a little help from mom and dad was necessary:

Holding the small SMT components with big nails is challenge!

We were pleased to see that girls also like to learn how to solder:

Day2 was for retro gaming, we though to make contest, but once the small kids sat and start playing nobody could possible move them away 🙂 so we just left them to have fun.

It was very pleasant to see that the new kids which are spoiled with their phones, tablets and fancy graphics still find quite interesting the games we play when we were on their ages even with humble graphics of 280×191 pixels 16 colors 🙂

Moon patrol definitely was one of their favorites.

Plastic Box for Neo6502 with Red or Blue Logo on it and light pipe for power supply LED

Neo6502 got beautiful plastic box with Red (Box-Neo6502-R) or Blue (Box-Neo6502-B) logo on it.

So which box will you choose the red one or the blue one?