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.

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:

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

LCD 7 inch with HDMI input and touch panel needs only 5V to operate

LCD-7HDMI is the perfect LCD for Neo6502 as it operates from 5V and have HDMI input and USB touch panel interface.

It will work well with any boards with HDMI like OLinuXino and Raspberry Pi.

The resolution is 800×480 pixels but the driver will auto scale any resolution up to 1080p.

The single 5V operating voltage make it perfect for portable devices working on battery.

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?

Neo6502 now can emulate Apple ][ and Oric Atmos

Neo6502 modern retro computer software development got nice push by Veselin Sladkov who successfully made Apple ][ and Oric Atmos emulators running on it.

This will unleash the other developments too as some of the developers were struggle at USB keyboard integration together with picoDVI which is solved in the emulators code.

The Veselin work is at Github.

To compile you will have to follow the simple instructions in the readme and also need Apple and Oric ROMs and Disks, these are big binary files and not good to stay at GitHub so we keep them on our ftp

The already compiled uf2 images with some games are also on the ftp. LodeRunner, Mario Bross, Neptune, Moon Patrol, Karateka, CrossFire are just few to name.

Neo6502 firmware update! Neo6502 prototypes are on the web for developers!

Neo6502 Firmware development update. Paul Robson does amazing work, and on top of his super Basic he added Apple ][ compatible mode. How cool is this? if you type “][” in the prompt you go to Apple ][ firmware and you can run all the Apple ][ old code:

This proves how flexible Neo6502 is! with proper setup it will mimic any old 6502 technology.

you can play in the emulator here:

http://www.robsons.org.uk/neo6502/neo.html

Rien Matthijsse also have progress on his Neo6502 firmware and tease us with 320×240 256 color graphics and sound add to the MSBASIC he is working on:

The project is on GigHub and you can follow the progress there:

https://github.com/marobi/Pico-6502-V3

As you see Neo6502 gives a lot of opportunities, having all peripherals software defined you can imitate old technology or even create your own which do not exist!

We want more developers to join and experiment, so we decided to put Neo6502 on web for sale.

We have build limited quantity of prototypes. Note that this is not final product, it may have changes in future. This developer edition is without complete software and is intended to people who can develop firmware for 6502 and RP2040.