This 6502 computer delivers a fully-fledged 6502 development environment with the convenience of using modern input and output devices. I ordered 'The Works' version of this computer as my soldering skills aren't quite up to snuff. I received a compact box containing the PCB and case, so I only needed to buy the ICs and Pi Picos and plug them into their respective, pre-soldered sockets on the PCB.

A lot of thought and development effort has been put in to make sure programming on this computer is as painless as possible. The crusty old EEPROM programmer and PS/2 keyboard has been replaced with their modern USB counterparts. Every single part used to build this computer is still in production as of April 2024, and can be ordered right off the shelves of any major electronic part distributor.

On top of that, by harnessing the compute power of the two Pi Picos on board, excellent graphics and sound support is now available out of the box when using the latest firmware. Documentation and software tooling for this computer is readily available, alongside convenient VSCode workspace templates. Overall, I'm very impressed and excited to get my hands wet with some classic 6502 assembly and BASIC!

If you're wondering what this SBC is, take a look at the creator's youtube channel, @rumbledethumps where he's made a few videos on the overall design, direction and goals of his project. He's got quite a few videos on it, but none are very long so it's quick to get caught up with where the project is now. To briefly summarize, the creator's goal was to design a 6502 platform that people could jump right in to and start developing for without having to deal with the little annoyances typical of 8-bit systems such as getting data loaded onto the computer.

This design is similar to Ben Eater's 6502 breadboard computer, but using 2 Raspberry Pi Pico microcontrollers to handle the function of a ROM chip and to provide a terminal interface to interact with the hardware. There are a couple of accessories you need that you likely already have, such as a USB hub with a micro-USB connector to connect directly to the Pico, a VGA to HDMI adapter if you don't have a display with VGA, and a USB flash stick to transfer files.

The ability to easily transfer files to the computer is what drew me to this project, with this design you no longer need to deal with pulling and reprogramming a ROM chip, it's as easy as loading files on to a USB stick and loading files with the supplied monitor program. Updating the Pico firmware is as easy, you just hold the reset button and plug in the USB cable and drop the new firmware like any other removable drive.

In addition to rumbledethumps' videos on his channel, he's also provided an incredible amount of documentation over on github where there is also an amazing community of people working on their own projects. There isn't a huge amount of available software for this platform yet, but if you're interested in writing software for a retro platform, now is the perfect time to get in on this project to make some significant contributions. Documentation also includes setting up a development environment, although documentation for Windows is sparse, there is a video on youtube from @leesmithsworkshop detailing how to get it set up on windows.

Putting the computer together is very simple, rumbledethumps provides a bill of materials in a spreadsheet on github that can be uploaded directly to Mouser to order all of the parts at once. He's also provided a video detailing his process of assembling the computer. I'm very new at soldering (I started just a month ago) and it was very easy to put together. I would strongly recommend this project for beginners, the resistor and capacitor values are silk screened on the back, all of the chips are labeled where to go on the board and there aren't a lot of tiny components to lose or break. The firmware to be loaded on the Pi Pico's is available on github, and they are simple to flash, and as stated before, software is loaded though USB stick.

The only downside is the lack of available software for it currently. It seems that for right now this project is primarily for developers, so if that's your goal, this is the perfect platform for you. I'm writing this in December 2023, and I expect sometime in the future there will be a lot more available software as this platform further develops.