Many of the cheap "educational toy laptops" which were somewhat common before "real" ones took over, also used a 6502-based SoC: https://github.com/davidgiven/vtech6502
I'm trying to figure out the video part, there is a demo screen that is showing pretty high res in color, and this says 1024x600 and 256 colours- that is mighty impressive for a 6502, that is driving way more pixels that I ever saw in that era, so I was expecting there was some other chip being used as a screen buffer and graphics chip...
but it looks like it is just memory mapped? I see the 8 bit data bus is driving the screen directly?
I don't see where in the memory map there would even be enough space for a screen buffer that large to be located.... ?
Very interesting project. It'd be nice to see video of it in action and what use cases the author had in mind. A pic in a different post shows the 48k ram chip, and not far away is an SD card of 1 gigabyte - that's a dramatic contrast. The storage can hold the contents of ram 21,845 times over. If an 8GB laptop today had the equivalent storage, it would be a disk of 174TB.
Browsing by tag 'lt6502b' gives other posts that have pictures of the motherboard. https://www.maddox.pro/?cat=65 (update: the codeberg link has all the relevant pics)
In the retro world we’ve already had the incongruent “64k RAM vs 8GB Storage” conundrum to deal with for decades.
My Oric Atmos with LOCI rig has every bit of software every developed for the Oric, ever, stored on its 8GB USB stick and literally has ~8GB left in storage. It used space is more like a rounding error at this point.
I hope that changes, though! ;)
Old computers never die - their users do!
Paula’s intention, I believe, is to make computing approachable again - her many, many synthesizer designs encode a form of nostalgic whimsy for older technology, and she produced a full-scale CPU project using only logic chips for the purposes of education - and as I know she is a huge UFO (TV Series) fan, she’s got a fair bit of creative potential being applied to the alt-computing track of things.
As a retro- nerd myself, I hope to see her laptop in action in real life some day. Would be awesome to see an Oric-1/Atmos ROM for it ..
A pic in a different post shows the 48k ram chip, and not far away is an SD card of 1 gigabyte - that's a dramatic contrast
Incidentally, cheap MP3/MP4 players in the last decade had a few hundred KB of RAM, an 8-bit CPU at a few dozen MHz, and a few GB of NAND flash: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S1_MP3_player
The 6502 can't actually address more than that. The flash controller built into modern SD cards are also going to be significantly more powerful than the 6502. And I'm surprised you can even buy SD cards that small still!
Unless you use bank switching, which historically a lot of 6502 machines did use (e.g. Apple III/IIe/IIc, BBC Master 128, Commodore 128, Commodore CBM-II, etc)
Not much later there was the Radio Shack Model 100, and a bit after that the Gateway portables, and of course, eventually the NEC Ultralite and eventually the Sharp PC-6220 (which was available under two other brands as well).
Also, for those with deep pockets there were the GRiD laptops....
Beat the heck out of dragging a 1702, a 1541 and a C64 around, though. I have three and they made regular trips to vintage fests because they were easy to set up. They can easily be connected to more drives or a bigger screen. Their only major drawback, and this is a big one, is that you can fry the SID if you plug in the external monitor with the power on. I did that once to my horror, and so have others.
A 6502 is capable of most actual workloads people have, whose profiles actually haven’t changed much. Almost all of our compute goes to GUI and rendering stacks that decorate our actual work.
The superpower of the PC over the previous generation was an order of magnitude more memory.
The machine itself was not necessarily faster, but the extra memory was a real game changer.
Even segmented like on the 8086 was a better solution than the banking options on 8 bit hardware. The ‘86 segment registers were much more flexible.
Long term, 640k may not have been enough, but in a text based environment, 640k is just so much more from both a data and code aspect to be really empowering.
256k and Lotus 1-2-3 was much more capable than anything an Apple could do. Having much more room for more capable code aspect as well as richer and more data.
You could do gymnastics with code overlays and data paging, but that was hard software to write and just painfully slow.
I favor simpler machines, but that seems a bit of a stretch. Most people would like to communicate over the internet without every intermediate hop seeing their traffic (so, their emails, their chats, their credit card number, ...), therefore they want TLS which I don't think is practical on a 6502? To say nothing of watching videos and listening to music.
I'd compare to a z80 with 64k of memory, which would be enough to run CP/M. That wouldn't allow TLS, or music playback, but it would allow wordperfect, turbo pascal, a bunch of old C-compilers, and a spreadsheet or two.
I don't think anybody would use such a machine full-time, but with a radio and a cabin it would suffice for offline work.
Of course there's no native CP/M for the 6502, but remakes have been made..
Surely a laptop prototype based on such a tested and well-worn CPU with 48K of RAM would be cool, but shouldn't it sip power? Like shouldn't it last for like months on a charge? Or am I revealing my very meager and outdated understanding of engineering with only a bachelor in computer science from like 2004?
It's gotta be integrated together (and possibly be at a smaller process size) before you get all the power savings. If you have a real 6502, it has no internal RAM or cache, and you need to send power back and forth to the RAM chips. (I presume it's SRAM, but it could also be PSRAM)
If you ran a 6502 emulator on a cheap ARM SOC, it would be much lower power.
There used to be small IBM PC compatible "palmtop" computers capable of running for many days on a pair of AA batteries. HP 200LX was pretty cool. I think it had 80C186 running at 10 MHz or thereabouts, with 1MB of RAM, monochrome graphic LCD and PCMCIA cards for storage. Norton Commander and Turbo C run on it without any problems.
It’s Paula Maddox, who has for decades now done all kinds of wild and wonderful projects - she is a synthesizer designer, her works resulted in the Modal Electronics company and its line of synths, prior to that she had her own cottage synth product line. She also designed a full-scale working CPU out of chips, an excellent education project.
(Disclaimer: I’m a huge fan of her work, still get one of the original Monowave prototypes in my rack, I delight in seeing her projects come to fruition)
Apple IIc (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_IIc)
and it's younger and final brother Apple IIc Plus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_IIc_Plus)
The Z80 has likewise experienced the same use: https://hackaday.io/project/166921-v-tech-genius-leader-prec...
Specs:
* 65C02 running at 10MHz
* 46KByte of user RAM
* EhBASIC 22p2 with custom extensions
* eWOZMON
* Compact Flash for storage
* Built in battery (7400mAh currently)
* USB-PD Rechargable
* 10.1" Screen with 1024x600 and 256 colours
* WiFi Modem (based on this - https://github.com/dhansel/WifiModem)
* nanoSwinSID for sound (as well as beeps)
but it looks like it is just memory mapped? I see the 8 bit data bus is driving the screen directly?
I don't see where in the memory map there would even be enough space for a screen buffer that large to be located.... ?
Turns out it looks awesome. I wasn't expecting such a striking design.
Browsing by tag 'lt6502b' gives other posts that have pictures of the motherboard. https://www.maddox.pro/?cat=65 (update: the codeberg link has all the relevant pics)
My Oric Atmos with LOCI rig has every bit of software every developed for the Oric, ever, stored on its 8GB USB stick and literally has ~8GB left in storage. It used space is more like a rounding error at this point.
I hope that changes, though! ;)
Old computers never die - their users do!
Paula’s intention, I believe, is to make computing approachable again - her many, many synthesizer designs encode a form of nostalgic whimsy for older technology, and she produced a full-scale CPU project using only logic chips for the purposes of education - and as I know she is a huge UFO (TV Series) fan, she’s got a fair bit of creative potential being applied to the alt-computing track of things.
As a retro- nerd myself, I hope to see her laptop in action in real life some day. Would be awesome to see an Oric-1/Atmos ROM for it ..
Incidentally, cheap MP3/MP4 players in the last decade had a few hundred KB of RAM, an 8-bit CPU at a few dozen MHz, and a few GB of NAND flash: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S1_MP3_player
Unless you use bank switching, which historically a lot of 6502 machines did use (e.g. Apple III/IIe/IIc, BBC Master 128, Commodore 128, Commodore CBM-II, etc)
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_SX-64
Also, for those with deep pockets there were the GRiD laptops....
Every machine ran BASIC. If your machine didn't, it was weird. For a while it seemed like BASIC was going to become the universal computer language.
IBM even produced a computer that had both AP/L and BASIC built-in.
The machine itself was not necessarily faster, but the extra memory was a real game changer.
Even segmented like on the 8086 was a better solution than the banking options on 8 bit hardware. The ‘86 segment registers were much more flexible.
Long term, 640k may not have been enough, but in a text based environment, 640k is just so much more from both a data and code aspect to be really empowering.
256k and Lotus 1-2-3 was much more capable than anything an Apple could do. Having much more room for more capable code aspect as well as richer and more data.
You could do gymnastics with code overlays and data paging, but that was hard software to write and just painfully slow.
Extra memory just made things that much better.
I don't think anybody would use such a machine full-time, but with a radio and a cabin it would suffice for offline work.
Of course there's no native CP/M for the 6502, but remakes have been made..
Because most people I know certainly have different workloads and need their rendering as part of the work, not to decorate it nicely.
But for keeping a distraction free digital diary, it might be a nice device.
Maybe Bullshit Jobs was onto something, it seems that my entire work day consists of work decoration.
Surely a laptop prototype based on such a tested and well-worn CPU with 48K of RAM would be cool, but shouldn't it sip power? Like shouldn't it last for like months on a charge? Or am I revealing my very meager and outdated understanding of engineering with only a bachelor in computer science from like 2004?
If you ran a 6502 emulator on a cheap ARM SOC, it would be much lower power.
https://basharchive.org/#s/Maddox
(Disclaimer: I’m a huge fan of her work, still get one of the original Monowave prototypes in my rack, I delight in seeing her projects come to fruition)