Friday, December 14, 2007 9:21 PM
When I was 13 (around 1989) I had an idea that involved making a Commodore 64 like machine to a server that people could play games on. I was addicted to a service called Quantum Link (The parent service to AOL) and I wanted friends of mine to experience the same thing on a cheap simple Atari like machine. This would allow people to play games together through a modem to a server farm that controlled the games. As all 13-year old children do, I lost interest in the project and went on to what most teenagers do.
Here is a picture of the prototype I built back then. Some of the parts were messed with, such as a missing sound and video chip. They were removed for me to show others how to make simple computers. But, this computer was the equivalant of a Commodore. It used a 6502 (Commodore had a 6510 that included a few IO ports). It also had 2 6522 VIA Interfaces that allowed it to talk to things like joysticks and keyboards. It had 32K of Static Ram and 16K of ROM. The other 16K was used for the interface chips such as sound, video, etc.
The project taught me quite a bit about how computers work and what not to bring up on a date.
Here are some of the pictures I took before tearing down the board today. The breadboard is still good and it's about time I used it for a new project.
As a side note, special thanks to my father for buying all the parts and computer junk to help me learn these things. He spent a lot of time and money helping me with these projects.