The KK Computer: A Radical 6502 Redesign (2018)

http://laughtonelectronics.com/Arcana/KimKlone/Kimklone_short_summary.html

by ddtaylor • 5 years ago

75 11 5 years ago

laughtonelectronics.com

dang• 5 years ago

If curious, past threads:

The KimKlone Microcomputer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26292235 - Feb 2021 (8 comments)

The KK Computer: A Radical 6502 Redesign - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16564257 - March 2018 (8 comments)

Bride of Son of Cheap Video: The KimKlone - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12468937 - Sept 2016 (2 comments)

The KimKlone: a radical 6502 redesign - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3070169 - Oct 2011 (24 comments)

just1morething• 5 years ago

It is delightful to see the love of discovery and exploration unfold around an electronic dream: "What if I do X, Y, or Z?"

Where do people go to put their darlings to the test? Is there a place these radical designs compete to satisfy more than a personal curiosity posed as a "what if?" Some sort of Homebrew derby?

codebje• 5 years ago

I don't know of a competition, but there is an 8-bit retro discord server: https://disboard.org/server/643973143358341151

Various projects get shown off, plenty of boards built around retro (and quasi-retro) CPUs, some more audacious stuff like rebuilding the Apollo Guidance Computer.

The ultimate homebrew derby is those brave enough to make their designs available for sale, I suppose.

vhodges• 5 years ago

Retro computing community: https://www.retrobrewcomputers.org/doku.php

There's stuff for sale on https://tindie.com/ and various projects on https://hackaday.io/

near2• 5 years ago

On a related note, I had always wished we at least got a complete PDF specification for the unreleased 65832, a 32-bit 6502 core. I'd love to implement it just for the novelty, even if nothing used it. http://www.mirkosoft.sk/65832.html

JdeBP• 5 years ago

There is too much TimeCube on that WWW site. Try this one.

* https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/14864/wha...

ndiddy• 5 years ago

From skimming the datasheet, it looks like a fairly bad product. Sure the A register is extended to 32 bits, but the 8 bit data bus means that it's not going to be much faster than the 65816 and the address bus is still 24 bits. I have no clue why WDC decided to keep the same pinout as the 65816.

near2• 5 years ago

Oh, it even has a datasheet! Thanks, that's amazing! The missing SEV instruction could have been aliased to SEP #$40. The only thing missing to produce a working replica today (in hardware or software, just for fun of course,) was indeed the XFE designation. The only place it could have gone was in the WDM prefix, but it could have been any byte after that. We would have to outright guess. He couldn't have reused XCE for it without risking perfect backward-compatibility (though of course he may have decided to do that anyway.)

codetrotter• 5 years ago

This made me wonder if anyone had designed a 64-but 6502. Came across this http://www.6502.org/users/andre/adv65/index.html which in turn links to many different things including a project that they had started on with making a 64-bit extension to 6502 for fun.

jacquesm• 5 years ago

That's really neat, I missed this on the previous runs I think. One of my very first computers was a KIM-1, I bought it from one of the security guards at a bank where I worked (as mail room sorter and mail runner).

Fond memories. The KIM ('keyboard input monitor') was a quirky little machine, with very little RAM but more general purpose IO than just about every computer today which led to a lot of real-world interface projects. I learned a ton from using it.

Thanks for posting this.

The KK Computer: A Radical 6502 Redesign (2018)

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