I guess its my turn to jump on the #septandy bandwagon. #septandy is where retro computing bloggers and youtubers take a look at tandy gear in the month of September. I picked up a tandy color computer 2 with a tandy tape drive on ebay a while back and hadn’t gotten around to testing it out. The coco2 only has RF out and the only RF device I had available was an old VCR.

After building Ben Eater’s 6502 computer, I wanted to try my hand at my own version. I wanted to utilize the full 32k of ram and use a real monitor as the display. I started with a W65C02 processor and an AT28C16 eeprom. I filled the eeprom with nop instructions and set the eeprom to the top of the memory map. I’m using the same slow clock module and Arduino sketch from Ben Eater to view the address and data buses in real time.

I’ve got a few of these old portable CRT TVs laying around and I thought I might use one of them for a display for a homebrew computer I am working on. The computer outputs a composite video signal, but these TVs are RF only, so I figured I’d try to mod one to add composite in. The TV I went with is a Bentley 100C. Mainly because I like the way it looks.

I finally had a few days off over the holiday weekend and was able to follow along with Ben Eater’s 6502 computer series on youtube. The videos series is well done and the build was pretty straight forward. The schematic for the final computer is below. I didn’t take too many pictures of the build process. I did start out with a different breadboard layout, but it was getting a bit cramped, so I built out the address and data buses down one side of the breadboard which made things much easier.

I picked up this c64 a while back at an estate sale. It was stored down in a damp basement and was pretty well coated in dirt and grime. Unfortunately, I didn’t take a picture of the case before I cleaned it up, but trust me, it was gross. After testing it, it did work without issue. Well, the VIC is pretty bad. The video quality isn’t great, but it does work.

A few weeks back, my son was digging around my parent’s attic and found an old laptop that I picked up in high school. The laptop is a Chaplet Systems Halikan NBA486. I found it in one of the cabinets in my electronics class and it was already almost a decade old, so my teacher said I could keep it. It didn’t have a battery or a power adapter, so I was never able to do anything with it, but when my son brought it home, I told him we’d try to get it working.