home   |   primer index   |   1. Intro: Why 6502?   |   2. addr decode   |   3. mem map req.s   |   4. IRQ/NMI conx   |   5. 74 families & timing   |   6. clk gen   |   7. RST   |   8. mystery pins   |   9. AC performance construction   |   10. exp bus & interfaces   |   11. get more on a board   |   12. WW Q&A   |   13. custom PCBs   |   14. I/O ICs   |   15. displays   |   16. getting 65xx parts   |   17. project steps   |   18. program-writing   |   19. debugging   |   20. pgm tips   |   21. workbench equip   |   22. circuit potpourri


6502 PRIMER: Building your own 6502 computer

Most circuits here are ones I've actually been using.  A few may be ideas I only sketched without trying—but I do have a strong record of circuits working right the first time.

All links below have been verified or fixed Dec 12, 2020.

Note that there are many ways to do most of these things, and probably just as many that a newcomer might think of that are DOA for various reasons.  The goal of this page is to make your home-made computer a useful "Swiss army knife" of the workbench, rather than just a novelty for fun only, or a consumer item.  There's no OS or kernel for it on my website yet, but I hope to publish my 6502 and 65816 Forths as time allows.


On this page:



First: a very basic whole-computer schematic

Since I have been asked for a whole-computer schematic of a really basic 6502 computer, here's one.  It's the first time in 18 years that I've put the whole computer in one diagram.  It is a modified (actually simplified) version of the schematic for the computer shown near the bottom of the page on address decoding.  There was the temptation to add other easy things, but the point here is to keep it almost as simple as it could be.
very basic 6502 computer
Notes:
  1. Three clock options are shown.  You will need to pick one.  Do not install the parts for all three on the same board. NOTE about the RC and crystal options above:  WDC no longer tests or specifies the gate delays between Φ0 in, Φ1 out, and Φ2 out for their newer 65c02's, and they would prefer that the designer use the external oscillator option.  All the same internal inverters seem to still be in place however, so I have little doubt that the circuit above will still work fine; but I had to pass the info on.  If you do it per WDC's preference, the output of your external oscillator (probably an oscillator can) goes to everything requiring Φ2, and pins 3 and 39 go unused.

  2. The reason the quad NAND gate is a 74HC132 instead of a 74HC00 is that the reset circuit needs the schmitt-trigger input.  The '132 will be a little slower than the '00, but there's a maximum of only two gate delays and that's in the I/O-select circuit.  It will be plenty fast for operation at a few MHz.  You might be able to find a 74AC132 which would be faster than the 74HC132.

  3. For the power input connector J1, choose a type that will not let you accidentally connect the power backwards.  DC-10 jacks are popular.

  4. JW1 selects which interrupt input you use to the processor.  If you stay with only one I/O IC, you will normally use only IRQ, not NMI.  For this, connect JW1 pin 2 to pin 3, and also pin 4 to pin 5.  If you add more I/O ICs later, you may want jumper selections for each one; but be sure to observe the methods in the IRQ/NMI connections section.

  5. JW2 needs to be shorted for non-WDC 65(c)02's.  For WDC, leave it open, because it is a vector-pull output instead of a ground connection.

  6. JW3 selects whether you're using a 27c256 EPROM or a 28c256 EEPROM.  For the 27c256, connect 2 to 3, and 4 to 5.  For the 28c256, connect 1 to 2, and 3 to 4.  Slight additional circuit complexity will be needed to allow the computer to write to its own EEPROM (see Daryl Rictor's example code in this forum post), using a WR signal as shown near the bottom of section 6 of this primer, on clock generation.

  7. Addresses will be:
  8. If you don't ever add another I/O IC, another way to do the address decoding would be to connect A15 to the VIA's CS2, and A14 to its CS1.  This removes one level of gate delay in the address decoding without changing the above addresses, but precludes ever adding more I/O ICs.  For most uses of the computer I would highly recommend at least one more VIA though!

  9. For each additional I/O IC you may want to add, connect its CS pin to I/O SEL and its CS pin to the next address line down.  This way you can have up to ten I/O ICs with no additional glue logic.  You can probably see already that each IC will have more than one possible addresses range; but it is still possible to address each IC individually.  In decades of doing it this way, I have never had any problem with it.

  10. The I/O pin headers are standard dual-row 14-pin headers with .025" square posts on .100" centers.  You will typically plug projects into these with IDCs on ribbon cables.  The pin numbering is given for as you look down on the pins from the top.  The organization is the same as Daryl's except that I made the power and ground connections at the ends such that accidentally reversing the IDC on the header will not swap power and ground and damage things.  If you want it compatible with his SBCs, make pins 1 & 2 to be ground, and 13 & 14 to be +5V.  Be sure to put enough room between the pin headers to plug the IDCs onto.  Insufficient room will prevent connecting both at once.

  11. The capacitors shown in the bottom-right corner should go from power to ground as close as possible to the power and ground pins of each IC, with the shortest possible leads and connections.  The value is not critical, and 0.1µF is common and is fine; but depending on the construction, .01µF sometimes results in better bypassing at higher frequencies where groundbounce is more of a problem.

In the tips below, you will see that you can interface an unexpectedly high amount of things on a single VIA; but again, I strongly recommend at least one additional VIA for most uses of the computer.  Note #9 above tells how to add more.  Even if you don't want to add it to start, if there's any possibility at all that you'll want it in the future, at least leave room for it and the connectors.

Do get cozy with the VIA's registers, timers, and capabilities.  Its name, Versatile Interface Adapter, is quite appropriate.  If you have questions, you can email me at wilsonminesBdslextremeBcom (replacing the B's with @ and .) or post them to the 6502.org forum.



Then: Connecting I/O devices

Using the 6522's shift register for tons of output bits

The 65(c)22 VIA's shift register (SR) has many modes of operation and uses.  When speed doesn't need to be superfast (as when controlling relays, audio connections, the output voltage of a programmable power supply, etc.), you can use the SR to expand the number of input and/or output bits, virtually without limit.  It becomes extra helpful when those bits need to be at a different logic voltage (like 12V), something other than the voltage the computer runs at.  (More on that later.)  First, consider a way to give lots of output bits at the computer's own logic voltage levels:

tons of output bits from a 6522's SR

Although four 74HC595's (giving 32 output bits) are shown, you can expand the chain almost indefinitely, as long as the 595's are CMOS (ie, have high-impedance inputs, unlike 74LS or other non-CMOS).  CA2 is shown as the output to latch the shifted values into the 595's, but you could use any output bit for that.  I like to use CA2 to leave PA and PB free for other uses where you might want all 8 bits of a port, like for an 8-bit A/D or D/A converter.  (I'll address that further down too.)  Use 6522 SR mode 101 to clock the data out under control of T2, or mode 110 to clock it at half the Φ2 rate.  Example code is given about 80% of the way down the front page of the 16-Bit Fixed-Point/Scaled-Integer Math section.  There's more there than you need for output only, but it shouldn't be hard to figure out.  I want to put code on this page here when I figure out how to put scrollable windows in it so the code doesn't make the page so long.


Using the 6522's shift register for tons of input bits

Similar to the above, the 65(c)22 VIA's shift register can be used to expand the number of input bits, again virtually without limit.  For this, use SR mode 001 to clock the data in under control of T2, or mode 010 to clock it at half the Φ2 rate.  These are bits 4, 3, and 2 of the VIA's auxiliary control register, or ACR.

tons of input bits from a 6522's SR

(The '165 signal pin not shown is the inverted serial output, pin 7.)

Althought only three 74HC165's (giving 24 input bits) are shown, you can expand the chain almost indefinitely, as long as the 165's are CMOS (ie, have high-impedance inputs, unlike 74LS or other non-CMOS).  CA2 is shown as the output to load the 165's when it's low and allow them to shift the loaded data bits when it's high.  (Later, when we address using the same SR for both and input chain and an output chain, we will need a 74HC126, and the CA2-high output will then also enable the '126.)  Again, I like to use CA2 to leave PA and PB free for other uses where you might want all 8 bits of a port.

"So why the 74HC74 D-type flip-flop at the end of the chain?" you might be asking.  The answer is that the VIA looks at the data line at the first rising Φ2 clock edge after the serial clock goes up; but the '165 also goes to the next bit when the serial clock goes up, so the first bit the VIA sees is bit 6, not bit 7.  Since the '165 chain gets ahead by one bit, we delay it by one bit with the flip-flop.  There are other ways to get around this, like putting the output of the last '165 around to the input of the first one and rotating in software (which is not practical if the chain spans multiple circuit boards), or offsetting the bits in the hardware connections (which might require adding an extra '165 to every board if the chain spans multiple boards).

When we get to the software, note that after you latch the data into the 165's, you have to do a dummy read of the VIA's SR to start the shifting process.  Then allow enough time to finish the process before reading again—at least 16 Φ2 clocks in mode 010, or longer in mode 001, depending on what you have T2 set to.  Read once more for each additional '165.  To restart the process and get a new set of readings, put CA2 low to load the new set of data into all the 165's, and then put it back high again to shift, then begin the shifting again, starting with the dummy read.


Using the 6522's shift register for both input and output

The circuit at approximately the middle of the front page of the 16-bit scaled-integer math section gives the idea for combining the two uses above.  The circuit there is a last-resort method to interface to the huge math look-up tables in ROM if all your other I/O is taken.  Interfacing to huge memory this way is slow, but still much faster than actually calculating the various trigonometric, logarithmic, and other functions, and it's accurate to all 16 bits.


SS22: Using the 6522's shift register for a link between computers

Article is at http://forum.6502.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=2175


Converting to and from higher-voltage logic

Some situations require interfacing to control circuitry that works on 12V or other voltage substancially higher than the 5V (or 3.3V, or whatever your creation works at).  I have, many times, used for example 4066, 4051, 4052, and 4053 analog switches to control 12V analog circuits (mostly audio), and these ICs needed the higher-voltage logic.  (Maxim has these available with 5V logic control, but it's a very expensive way to go.)  Consider the common and cheap 14-pin LM339.  This diagram shows going from TTL-level logic to 12V logic levels:

TTL to 12V logic-level conversion with an LM339
If you take the top of R1 to a different voltage, you will need to change the resistor value.  If this goes to a separate board that only has 12V (or other high voltage) available and not 5V, you can of course take R1 to that voltage, and calculate the adjusted value.  1.4V across 22K gives 63.6µA, so take your high voltage minus 1.4V and divide that result by 63.6µA to get your resistor value.  It's not critical to get the reference voltage very exact in this case, so you can round to the nearest standard value within 20% or so and do just fine.  The input bias current of each LM339 section is typically only 25nA, not enough to make a dent in the calculation, so we can leave it out for simplicity's sake, even if you run the same reference to many LM339 sections.

For going the other direction, ie, higher voltage to 5V logic, you can do something like this:

12V to 5V logic-level conversion with an LM339
It does not have to be 12V of course.  The LM339 can work up to 36V, and although its power supply voltage needs to be at least 2V, the input & output can go even much lower than that.  If 12V (or similar) logic is driving the input, you will do just fine if you want to connect the reference to the 5V supply, and then you won't need to get the reference from resistors.

A comparator is similar to an op amp, but it's not an op amp.  The comparator is made to have its output hit the rails and recover more quickly than an op amp of similar price can.  The penalty is that the phase response is not kept under control to keep it stable in an analog output range; but that's not what it's for anyway.  One of the reasons for this comparator however is the open-collector output that lets the high output voltage be independent of the comparator's supply voltage.

For best speed:

I've gotten over 4MHz with a 4049 following the LM339 this way.  The LM360 and probably others are faster, but often the circuitry on the 12V side can't use any more speed than the 339 can deliver anyway.  I used the LM339 in my home-made PIC microcontroller programmer because the workbench computer that runs it runs at 5V but the programmer can verify at anywhere from 2V to 6V (so yes, it is production-worthy), controlled by the workbench computer's D/A output.  This requires logic-level translation, hence the LM339; but although it worked for many years on many different PIC variations I programmed, there was trouble sometimes with the PIC16F72 and PIC16F74 which turned out to be because the slew rate on the clock line coming out of an LM339 section was not fast enough.  The solution was to add a pair of 74HC14 Schmitt-trigger inverter sections in series to improve the rise time.  (The 'HC14 can work at 2V to 6V, so it was ok.)

For going between 5V and 3.3V or other low logic voltages, there are other ICs on the market that would be more suitable than the 339 (although I have used the 339 there too), like the 74LVCxx family.  Additionally, after I wrote the above, "ttlworks" on the forum alerted me to the 74LS06 (inverting) and 74LS07 (non-inverting) open-collector hex buffers which are much faster than the 339 and have a maximum output voltage of 30V but whose inputs do make for a greater load and are not available in CMOS; and Jeff Laughton alerted us to this series of TI videos on their LSF family of voltage-level translation ICs.


Efficient bit-twiddling and testing

The 74xx251 and '259 can be used to twiddle or test I/O bits independently of others in a set, much more efficiently than you can with just a 6522 VIA.  On the front page of this site, I offer a module with 8 input bits and 8 output bits for this.  It requires neither RMW instructions, nor AND nor ORA instructions, nor altering A, X, or Y.  The data sheet (.pdf) has the circuit, ideas for implementation, sample code, and more, which you can use to build such a circuit onto your own board, or you can buy mine.  The idea came from the book "Advanced 6502 Interfacing" by John M. Holland, first edition, pages 37 & 53.
WM-3a bit-I/O module


Driving 12V relay coils

For driving 12V relay coils, the 339's output might be slightly anemic; so instead, it's probaly best to connect 5V logic outputs to the base of something like a 2N4401 transistor, connect the emitter to ground, and the collector to the low side of the relay coil.  Don't forget the diode to protect the transistor from the inductive turn-off transient!

2N4401 transistor driving relay coil
The resistor value was chosen for a 15mA coil and making sure the transistor is really saturated even if its gain is at the low extreme of its allowable current-gain range and the circuit feeding it can't pull up to more than about 3V.  CMOS will be able to pull it up higher but the overdrive is nowhere near enough to hurt anything.

If you need a lot of these, you might do better to use an IC like the ULN2803 which has 8 Darlington drivers in an 18-pin package with integral resistors and protection diodes.  That would replace 24 discrete components, three for each circuit above, times eight.  The only negative about it is that being Darlington, the output voltage won't come down to much under a volt.  The configuration shown above however allows the output voltage to come nearly all the way to ground if the load is light enough and the bias current strong enough for the chosen transistor.


High-voltage shift registers

If you have a lot of higher-voltage (e.g., 10V, 12V, 15V) circuits you need to interface to your computer which has 5V I/O, it makes sense to use higher-voltage shift registers and only convert the three bits that go to and from the 6522's SR, instead of using the 74HC165's and 595's above and converting gobs of bits.  So use the LM339 circuits (three bits fit into a single 339's four sections with one left over), and, instead of the 165's and 595's, use 4094's for output bits and 4021's for input bits.  Again, the shift-register chains can be quite long.  4000-series logic is very slow compared to 74HC, 74AC, 74LS, etc., but is good for 18V max.  Note that there is no "74" in front of the 4000 numbers in this case.

In the automated test equipment I designed, built, and programmed in approximately 1990, I drove approximately 75 relays by way of Allegro Microsystems UCN5821A (I think it was made by Sprague at the time) 8-bit, serial-in, parallel-out 16-pin shift registers which are rated for 50V, 350mA, made specifically for driving relays and other heavyish loads.  It looks like Micrel, now acquired by Microchip, sells it now under the part number MIC5821BN.  These were mixed in with lots of 4094's in the same serial chain all controlled by the same three pins of the 6522 VIA.

There's also TI's TPIC6 line of logic ICs, with for example the TPIC6A595 shift register that is similar to the 74HC595 mentioned above in the section "Using the 6522's shift register for tons of output bits" but with open-drain outputs that can handle 50V when off and 350mA each when on, even though the IC's power supply and logic inputs are 5V, and it has extra ground pins to handle all that extra current (IOW, it cannot be used as a drop-in replacement for the 74HC595).  Also available are the '259 8-bit addressable latch and the '273 octal D-type latch, although these last two are much more expensive, at over $4 each in singles.


Interfacing to I²C

There are hundreds, possibly thousands, of peripheral ICs on the market, from many manufacturers, that are interfaced by way of I²C (commonly pronounced "eye squared see") which stands for "inter-integrated circuit" and was invented by Philips.  Wikipedia has quite a write-up on it, and Philips has a seminar-style overview on it.  It is a synchronous-serial interface that requires only two wires; a bi-directional data line and a clock line.  Each transaction is begun with a "start" condition and then the address of the target device.  The other devices stand by and don't respond or do anything until there's a "stop" condition followed by another "start" condition and their address.  As long as you don't go too fast for the bus with its stray capacitance, there are no particular timing requirements like RS-232 has, so bit-banging it is very easy.  More on that later.  Here's one way to interface I²C to a 6522 VIA:

6522 VIA driving an I²C bus

You can use any I/O bits you want, but I chose the ones above for particular reasons.

Note that although many I²C devices can clock at 1MHz, others have a 400kHz speed limit, so if you run a 6502 at even a few MHz, you may exceed that and have to add NOP instructions to slow it down.  In that case, using the bits I assigned above to reduce the number of instructions may not give any real advantage; so you might as well assign the bits any way you like.  I will address SPI later.  (I already have generic code to bit-bang SPI posted here.)  SPI can go much, much faster, so you will probably want to reserve PA0 or PB0 to bit-bang the SPI clock unless you do SPI through something like Daryl Rictor's 65SPI chip.  (And again, now there are Jeff Laughton's circuit tricks much further down the page.)  In any case, I²C's passive pull-ups coupled with the unavoidable bus capacitance will always keep a lid on I²C's speed.

Next you might be wondering about the pull-up resistors.  This is how I²C manages to send signals in both directions without bus contention.  Devices can only pull it down, not up.  I've done it such that the master does pull the clock line (but not the data line) both up and down, and that's normally not a problem; but the spec does allow multiple masters, and also a few devices can hold the clock low to tell the master not to send the next bit yet (which would require that the master check that the clock line has floated up before it pulls it back down).  Handshaking is usually accomplished through the ACKnowledge bit though, and that's on the data line at the end of a byte.

Ok, so how do you have the VIA only pull down and not up?  Simple—store a "0" in the applicable bit of the output register, then write to the data-direction register (DDRA or DDRB) for the particular port.  When you want it to pull it down, you set the bit to be an output; or to let the pull-up resistor pull it up, you set it as an input, even if you don't particularly need to read it.  (The interesting thing about that is that since a "1" in the data-direction register bit means "output" and a "0" means "input", pulling it down requires setting it to "1", and letting it float up means setting it to "0", instead of vice-versa.)  You don't actually keep writing to the output register itself.  This is one place where the 6522 is far more efficient codewise than the 6521 or 6520 which do not allow a light-footed method of quickly going from accessing the ports to accessing the data-direction registers and vice-versa.

The I²C devices are all connected in parallel.  Each class of device has an address group assigned to a few bits in the address byte, and then the device might also have a few extra pins that you can connect to Vcc or ground to provide more bits in the address byte and allow several devices of the same class to be on the bus at the same time.  This way you can have more than one EEPROM, more than one digital thermometer, more than one D/A converter, etc..

If you want to make module to plug in, I would suggest the I2C-6 connector standard we devised on the 6502.org forum.  The page has diagrams and photos.  Use of the interrupt pin is optional, but it would be good if you incorporated it on your computer so that for example if you make a module for time and date and it has an alarm capability which uses the interrupt, or a keypad controller that interrupts when a key is pressed, you're all set.  I offer a tiny I2C-6 32KB 24256 EEPROM module on the front page of my site.

There is 65c02 assembly generic I²C code here.  Various devices will have their own detailed operation which will be given in their data sheets; but there will be basic things that they all share.  The link also has Forth and PIC code for 24xx I²C EEPROMs, and Forth code for the MAX520 I²C quad 8-bit D/A converter.


Interfacing to SPI and Microwire

Another popular synchronous-serial interface is SPI (pronounced "ess-pee-eye") which stands for "serial peripheral interface."  In principle, the way it works is similar to the interfacing to dumb shift registers as shown further up this web page; but SPI devices tend to be much more intelligent.  SPI was named by Motorola who rounded up various synchronous-serial protocols that were already in use and asigned the mode numbers and tried to make it all more understandable.  If you implement SPI, you'll also have National Semiconductor's Microwire too, as it came first as is compatible with SPI mode 0.  As a bonus, SD cards have an SPI mode.

Wikipedia has quite a write-up on SPI.  Unlike I²C, SPI can be full duplex; and because it is not limited by passive pull-ups like I²C is, SPI's maximum speeds are dozens of times as fast as I²C's.  For this reason, the larger flash memories especially will be found in SPI and not I²C, as storing a 10-megapixel photograph for example to an I²C memory would take much too long.  Bit-banging with a 6522 VIA as shown below will not operate SPI anywhere near its maximum speed, but it still enables us to help ourselves to hundreds (if not thousands) of great ICs on the market, made by dozens of manufacturers.  (For maximum SPI speed available in a 65-family IC, see the 65SPI (not to be confused with 65SIB) I/O IC which is designed and sold by Daryl Rictor and provides direct and complete SPI support in a 65-family IC, without bit-banging.)  Jeff Laughton's circuit tricks much further down this page also make possible much faster bit-banging, using illegal 65c02 op codes.  For example, you can set or clear an output bit in a single clock cycle without affecting the other bits in the port!  Not quite as fast as Jeff's, but more efficient than using a VIA, is the bit-I/O module I offer on the front page of this site, starting Aug 17, 2022.

SPI normally involves four wires for one SPI device (or slave), plus an extra one for each additional device.  There's a clock line (often abbreviated SCLK for "serial clock"), a master-in, slave-out (MISO) data line, a master-out, slave-in (MOSI) data line, plus one negative-logic chip-select (CS) for each device or slave.

Each transaction is begun by putting the slave's CS line low and then sending the command, ie, telling the slave what you want it to do, whether to take the following data and do something with it, or output some data, etc..  Non-selected devices stand by and don't respond to anything on the clock, MISO, or MOSI lines.  The SPI modes used by the different slaves on the bus do not need to match, as only one slave will be enabled at a time (unless you daisychain, something which will not be addressed here.)

As long as you don't exceed the device's speed limits (which you're not likely to do if you bit-bang with a 6522 VIA), there are no particular timing requirements like RS-232 has, so bit-banging it is very easy.  More on that later.  Here's a really basic SPI connection:

6522 VIA driving a single SPI device

You can use any I/O bits you want, but I chose the ones above because again bit 0 of a port is the easiest and quickest to pulse in software (using INC and DEC), and bit 6 or 7 of a port are easiest to test (using the BIT instruction).

The arrows show signal direction.  Since normally no line is bi-directional, it makes it easy to convert logic voltage levels if necessary.

It wouldn't be a bad idea to put weak pull-up resistors on all the lines so that no line floats between logic levels before the VIA is set up.  Non-WDC VIAs (like Rockwell, even the CMOS ones) do effectively have a pull-up resistor similar to 74LS, but WDC's are truly high-impedance CMOS in the input mode.  However, at least an accidentally selected SPI slave won't do anything if the clock and MOSI lines don't toggle in a sequence that it understands as a valid command.

Depending on the SPI modes you need, you can sometimes share clock and data lines with I²C.  You'll have to observe the following:

To interface to more devices, you will need more CS lines, using more VIA output bits.  This is shown below, along with the entire 65SIB (6502.org Serial Interface Bus) circuit on my workbench computer.  65SIB is basically SPI but expanded in several directions at once, making it suitable as an external bus too, and accommodating devices ranging from dumb to highly intelligent.  (Don't be scared off by the complexity of the circuit.  Half of it is just to feed the annunciator LEDs.)

6522 VIA driving 65SIB for multiple SPI (and other serial) devices
Notes:

  1. Solid arrows on connections (except to VR, the reference voltage) show signal direction.

  2. There's sample code at SPI.ASM (augmented on 12/11/20).

  3. I have a ton of I/O-bit sharing on my VIAs, and the various DIP switch sections allow me to isolate the 65SIB from other circuits if it becomes necessary.

  4. You can use any I/O bits you want, but I chose the ones above because of which ones I had available on the workbench computer, and because again bit 0 of a port is the easiest and quickest to pulse in software (using INC and DEC), and bit 6 or 7 of a port are easiest to test (using the BIT instruction).

  5. The LED current-limiting resistors on the IRQ and CONFIG lines a have lower value than the CLK one because these two LEDs will flash so briefly at at such a low duty cycle that they will need some help (by way of more current) to be seen.

  6. The ±12V is not part of the SPI spec, but we put it in the 65SIB spec so that external equipment that does not consume much power could get power off the bus and not need its own power supplies.  (Explanation is given in the 65SIB specification.)

  7. The configuration line (CONFIG) is not part of the SPI spec either.  Intelligent 65SIB devices can use it, but it will have no effect on non-intelligent devices, so in that case you could use it for something else on them if desired.  For example, an SPI LCD may use it for a register-select line, and a flash memory might use it for a HOLD line.  I have ones here that do that.)

  8. The pull-up resistors as mentioned in the notes for the simpler diagram further up are included, to prevent ambiguous states before the VIA is initialized in software.  The one on MISO is heavier, to get faster rise time if you use a 74LS07 or other open-collector parts for voltage translation on 65SIB devices.

  9. PA6 and S7 allow both a software-controlled method and a manual method to disable 65SIB (and SPI) interrupts.

  10. I used an LM339 open-collector quad comparator mainly because of the IRQ output; but there are different ways you could handle the comparator functions here.  They do not need to be super fast.  The LM339 does not do well with inputs that are within 1.5V of its Vcc, but I powered it with 12V as I have it available anyway for other things on the workbench computer.  The 74LS07 hex open-collector buffer would work too.

  11. To free up some VIA pins and make your bit-bang code a little faster and more compact, you can use the WM-3a bit-I/O module I offer on the front page of this site, or use ideas from its data sheet (.pdf) to implement the circuit on your own board.

  12. To ease the construction of 65SIB devices, I plan to offer a 65SIB breakout board.  The reason for it is that after we developed 65SIB on the 6502.org forum, I made a peripheral with the small graphic LCD and an SPI flash, and found it was a lot of work to wire up the connectors, regulator, and do the voltage translation to 3.3V.  The breakout board takes care of all that, and has lots of stuffing options for voltage regulators, interfacing to 5V, 3.3V, or 2.5V parts, and more.  (PCBs are already made, but modules have not been assembled yet.)

  13. For other explanations on 65SIB, see the specification.

We also have the SPI-10 connector standard for small modules, similar to I2C-6 above.  See the spec here.  I have a tiny SPI-10 flash memory module available on the front page of this site.

When I built my first 65SIB device on a proto board (not a PCB), I found that it was quite a bit of work to wire up the connectors and the voltage-translation circuits; so later I laid out a PCB for future projects, and am making it available to others as well, on the front page of this site.  It looks like this (shown in two stuffing versions):
65SIB breakout board

10/11/23:  Forum member BruceRMcF just posted a couple of ideas for using the VIA to do SPI somewhat faster than normal bit-banging.


Keypads and keyboards

There are many ways to implement a keypad or keyboard.  The goal here is to give some basic ideas and some considerations the beginner might not have thought of, and then hopefully the reader's imagination will be freed up to meet the need.

Starting at the simplest point, you can have a pushbutton switch from one of an I/O IC's input pins to ground, and a resistor of 4.7K or 10K to pull the pin up to Vcc when the button is not being pushed.  Note that as long as you're not needing to push the button, you can use this pin for something else too.  When I've designed products with PIC microcontrollers which are programmed with a serial connection with one line for clock and one for data, I've put pushbuttons on the same pins, as there will never be a need to push a button while the device is being programmed, and the programmer will never be connected when a button needs to be pushed.

Going to the next step, you can have several buttons connected to output bits, with a common connection to a pulled-up input bit, like this:

5-key keypad schematic

Note that the output bits can be connected to other things as well.  Just don't press more than one key at a time if you keep the bits in output mode full time, or you'll have two or more outputs shorted together, unless you put a diode (preferably a Schottky one) above each key switch, with the cathode at the top.  (There's another way to get around that, discussed in a minute.)

I'm partly out to get maximum function with minimum parts though, as construction takes time, and hardware is a bigger job to swap out or modify than software is.

Your software needs to bring one of the output lines down at a time, then read the input line and see if it's high or low.  A high input bit means the key that is on the low output is not being pressed.  Make the software cycle through them.  More on software considerations in a minute.

The five-key keypad is what I have on my workbench computer, and the five VIA output bits feeding the keys also go to the LCD and my printer interface.  I do the software development on a DOS PC and send code over the RS-232 line; but the keypad is convenient for various things once a piece of code is set to running.  The keys can be used for anything you determine in your software, but the functions I usually give mine are:

Yes
Enter
Continue
Up
No
Cancel
Exit
  Down  
Help
Menu
Edit

I have this to the right of the LCD on my 6"x4.5" workbench computer, with 6mm tactile keyswitches soldered to DIP headers that are plugged into DIP sockets; but as I gave it commands from the PC on the desk opposite the workbench and turn around toward the workbench to see instant results, there were times that I wanted the keys within reach without having to get up each time; so I also made a remote keypad and added a pin header on the workbench computer to connect it with a long cord, like this:

remote 5-key keypad

(This is in my Tip of the Day column too.)  The connections to the two keypads are in parallel, so it all goes to the same I/O bits, and a given key has the same effect regardless of which keypad it is pressed on.  The pin header it plugs into has a few extra pins so I could also put a duplicate LCD on the remote module.

For more keys, even a full keyboard, you can do something like the following.  (To save drawing time, I'll just use a circle to represent each switch connecting the vertical line and the horizontal line that go through that circle.)

16-key keypad schematic

As above, pressing more than one key at a time could cause contention (depending on which ones they are), unless you add the diodes or other means to prevent shorting outputs to each other.  The software needs to lower one output line at a time, then see if any of the input lines are low, then go to the next output line, cycling through the set.  It might be best to have it return a pair of bytes with one bit to represent each of the 16 keys.

Actually, there is a no-diode way to prevent the shorting-outputs problem.  You can write 0's to the output bits (by writing to the VIA's ORA or ORB), and then make only one of the output bits an output at any given time (by writing to the VIA's data-direction registers DDRA or DDRB).  When it's not pulling the line down, any given bit is an input.  This has the effect of an open-drain (or open-collector) output.  We pulled this trick above in the section on interfacing to I²C, which has sample code linked.  The only pullups then are passive, ie, the resistors—and BTW, it might then be a good idea to put pull-up resistors on those as well, not just the inputs, so there won't be ambiguous logic levels at any pins when keys aren't being pressed.

16 keys is what I put on the last automated test equipment setup I designed, built, and programmed at my last place of work in about 1990:

ATE keypad

An earlier set I did used a full PC keyboard, and it just took a lot of space on the workbench, and it, plus the big monitor, turned out to somehow make the test operator think she knew more than she did and it became a bit of a pain.  The smaller keypad afforded ways to get to all the menu items and enter the needed info just fine.  The blank key could be used for a shift key to give other ones more functions.  These ½" square Grayhill type 87 keys are really nice because their pins fit into prototyping board and they have clear caps you can remove to put labels underneath.  (As you can see, I didn't go to the effort to make the labels look really professional.)

You can get away with taking fewer bits on the 6522 VIA (or other I/O IC) if you use something like a 74HC138 3-to-8-line decoder.  The above shows 16 keys on 8 I/O bits; but with the '138, you could put three 6522 outputs to the '138 and have the 8 outputs of the '138 feed 8 columns, then with only three inputs on the 6522, you could have 24 keys (3x8) with only 6 bits total on the 6522 instead of 8.  You can take it further of course.  A keypad is not a high-speed device by any means, and the serial I/O above, using 74HC165's and 74HC595's, can easily put an 8x8 (or bigger) key matrix on the 6522's shift-register port, along with lots of other things, and not take any additional pins on the 6522.

The 6502-based Oric computer keyboard used a 4051 instead of a 74HC138.  Since it's a 1-to-8 analog switch (with three control bits), the non-selected outputs were high-impedance, so no other provision was necessary for allowing multiple keys to be pressed at once.  4000-series logic is very slow and not suitable for a lot of computer use, but you won't be making hundreds of thousands of keystrokes per second anyway.  Here's the Oric keyboard schematic:

Oric 58-key keyboard schematic

You must debounce!  "What does 'debouncing' mean?", you might ask.  Switches are not perfect, and if you look at the output as they make or break contact, it will not be a single, solid, fast edge, but a bunch of up-and-down for a few thousandths of a second until the switch quits bouncing and settles down.  This was illustrated in the "Reset requirements" page, and it shows deboucing there in hardware because you cannot do it in software while you're resetting the processor.  You have probably had the experience of a bad calculator or other keypad where it acted like you pressed a key many times even though you pressed it only once.  The calculator probably had some debouncing, but not good enough for a less-than-new keypad.  It's very irritating!

It is much easier to do debouncing in software than hardware.  What I have done for debouncing on many products is to require that the switch be closed for at least 30ms at a time before it is recognized.  It is sampled many times in that amount of time, and if any sample shows it released again, the count starts over.  The same goes for releasing it.  You may think that 30ms is unreasonably long; and indeed new switches won't need that long, but as the switch gets older, it will need increasing amounts of debounce time.  (What I plan to do in the future is to register the keypress almost immediately, but not register the next one until the needed debounce time is met and it has clearly been released and pressed again.)

I frequently also add auto-repeat, and, on the workbench computer, I have a variable to set the delay before repeat begins, and another variable for repeat rate.  Auto-repeat is useful even on a small keypad, because you might for example want to increment or decrement something with the up- and down-arrows while watching the results, and having sometimes even hundreds of button pushes (ie, no auto-repeat) would be tiresome, slow, and also reduce the life of the switches.

Newcomers tend to do the timing in software delay loops, but I would encourage use of a real-time clock (RTC) instead, whether it's an RTC chip with adequate time resolution, or a software RTC that is interrupt-driven by timer 1 (T1) of the 6522 VIA, or other method.  My interrupts primer tells how to set up the RTC using the 6522, and has complete code, starting a little over half way down the page.  (Enjoy my out-of-date cartoons!)  Having an RTC allows the computer to be doing something useful between key repeats, and the repeat rate stays consistent regardless of the varying size of the job between repeats.

My article on simple methods to do multitasking without a multitasking OS has example code for doing keypad debouncing and handling a shift key plus auto repeat of the cursor keys, near the end, timing things while allowing the computer to be done other things at the same time.

Two-key rollover can be done in sofware too.  Just stop scanning the keypad or keyboard until the currently pressed key is released.  Until then, you only watch that one key. 

For other keypad- & keyboard-interfacing possibilities, I should mention that there are many I²C keypad controllers on the market that have built-in debouncing and sometimes also drivers for 7-segment LEDs and other I/O built in, and you can connect them (along with other things) to your I²C interface described above.  Note also that the common PS/2 keyboard interface is very similar to I²C.  Daryl Rictor shows how to interface it to a 6522 here, with code, and shows how to do it with an AVR microcontroller here, again with code, and interface it to his 6502 SBCs.  (Please note that the power pins on his are slightly different from what I put at the top of this page.)

The darnedest thing I've ever seen in keypad interfacing was to connect the key switches to an arrary of resistors pulled up to Vcc and produce a single voltage to go into an A/D converter.  The application was a microcontroller that was short on I/O pins but had a spare A/D input!


Displays

Displays are discussed in the Displays section of the primer but here I'll isolate the part of the schematic that I have on the workbench computer showing a simple interface to the common intelligent character LCDs:

4-bit LCD interface schematic
NOTES:

  1. The first thing you might be thinking is "Where are D0 through D3?"  They're not connected, because I'm using it in 4-bit-interface mode to save VIA pins.  More below.

  2. The 10K potentiometer adjusts the viewing angle.  Note that many supertwist LCDs that are more attractive need a negative voltage for this.  I find people have quite a bit of resistance to implementing voltages other than 5V, especially negative voltages, but there are various things that having a ±10 or ±12 volts (non-critical) will be useful for, so it would be good to have them available.  There is not typically much current required of these.  Farther down this page at "Non-typical power-supply circuits," I give easy ways to get these voltages without having to change your power supply.

  3. Here we tie the R/W to ground.  The main reason to read the LCD is to see if it's still busy with an operation before giving it something more to do; but if you don't need to go absolutely as fast as possible, you can just wait the maximum amount of time the data sheet says the various operations, and you'll be assured that you're in the clear.  Otherwise we only need to write to it.  It might be a bigger deal for a large display, but here we can save a pin.  NOTE: It may be tempting to put a resistor between this pin and ground in case you later want to drive it.  A jumper selection would be better, because it's like a LSTTL input which takes a lot to pull down.  I wasted some time and discovered this the hard way.

  4. Sample code to operate this is at LCDcode.asm.

  5. Note again the doubling up (or in this case, tripling up) on VIA pins' usage.  In another product I developed, the lines were also shared with a D/A converter.

  6. Since a small display like 1x16 (one line of 16 characters) does not need the data fed super fast, you might even choose to feed it through 74HC595's on a serial chain as described above.  It would partly pay for itself in that there would be little or no need to go with the 4-bit interface to save pins (as opposed to the 8-bit interface).  The 8-bit would make the software a little simpler, not having to split bytes and feed the nybbles separately.

  7. Pin-out may differ slightly between manufacturers, especially by swapping ground and Vcc, so do not use the pinout of mine without checking your data sheet.

  8. Note that the E (enable) input on these LCDs is positive logic, ie, active high, not active low.  Also, it must be gated by Φ2.
I have interfaced to 1x16, 1x24, 2x20, 2x24, 2x40, and 4x40.  The nice thing about these intelligent character displays is that they all use pretty much the same instruction set; so after you've used one, your software may not need to change to use one of another brand.  The 4x40's work like a pair of 2x40's, one above the other, with all lines paralleled except E.

I have only a mild interest in graphics.  I made a very simple circuit and software to do raster graphics on an analog oscilloscope.  See http://forum.6502.org/viewtopic.php?p=15348#p15348.

I also have a small 128x64-dot graphics LCD that is interfaced by SPI, so I put it on the 65SIB.  I have working sample code for it here.  Here's a few seconds of demo video done for experiment purposes, using a random number generator to produce sets of 25 random segments then displaying the screen memory:




Printer interface

A parallel printer is written to similar to other kinds of latches—that you set up the data and then strobe a line to tell it to take it—but it has other lines to tell you if it's busy (mostly meaning its print buffer is full and it needs to catch up a bit before it can accept more data), has some error condition, is offline, etc., plus inputs for things like reset.

8/30/22 note:  I just got a new Epson LX-350 to replace a couple of decades-old Epson printers here that were ailing.  It was $217 brand new on eBay, no more than I was expecting to have to pay for a repair on the others.  I'm very pleased with it.  Print quality is excellent for a 9-pin, and it's faster than any I've seen before, maybe a little smaller too.  It has parallel (which I use), RS-232, and USB interfaces.  It's the cheapest of the fourteen (!) models of dot-matrix impact printers that Epson still offers.  They have 24-pin ones too.  They know that this market isn't going away, and they've picked up the slack where other manufacturers have stopped making them.  Epson puts the same command set in all of them, the ESC/P printer control language, the industry standard for simple, sophisticated, efficient operation of dot-matrix printers, and you can download the command reference here (.pdf) (since this information was not in the manual).


The timing diagram from the manual for one of my several parallel printers shows:

parallel printer timing requirements

The lower two lines, data and strobe, are computer outputs to the printer, while the upper two, busy and acknowledge, are computer inputs from the printer.  You do need to pay attention to the busy line, but I've never paid attention to the acknowledge line.  Technically, the busy line is not an acknowledgement that the byte you just sent it was actually received; but this is the way I have done it since 1990, with a half-dozen different printers from four different manufacturers, and it has always worked flawlessly.  the reason I started doing it this way was probably to save another VIA I/O bit.  That additional line would have to be on one of the CA or CB lines for the edge-sensitivity since the ACK\ pulse is narrow enough that it might get missed if I only sampled it.

Since there's no hurry with printers and the occasional poll will stay ahead of the printing and keep data in the buffer anyway, I've never put them on interrupts.  I might if I were spooling a super long printout, but I've never done more than a couple of pages at a time with the workbench computer and the automated test equipment at my last place of work; and in those cases, an interrupt-driven process could continue while the non-interrupt-driven print routine babysat the printer.

Your software needs to check the printer's status before every single byte.  Before stopping with an error condition saying the printer is not ready, your software should allow a couple of seconds for the printer to say everything is ok.  Especially in non-graphics mode, you will be able to send data much faster than the printer can print it, meaning you may fill up its buffer and have to wait for the printer to be ready to take more data.

Parallel printers normally have a 36-contact female Centronics connector, and for reasons unknown to me, computers with a parallel printer port usually have a female DB-25 connector on them, so the standard printer cables (before USB) are generally terminated in the male of each of these two connector connector types.  I put a 16-pin header on my workbench computer since it takes so much less board space, then made up an adapter cable to go from IDC (to plug into the pin header) to DB-25 (to mate with the standard printer cable).  The connections go this way:

IDC
pin
DB-25
pin
Centronics
contact
function (Note 1) into or out
of printer?
Notes
1 1 1 strobe IN
2 2 2 D0 IN
3 3 3 D1 IN
4 4 4 D2 IN
5 5 5 D3 IN
6 6 6 D4 IN
7 7 7 D5 IN
8 8 8 D6 IN
9 9 9 D7 IN
10 10 10 ACK OUT 2
11 11 11 Busy OUT
12 12 12 Paper out OUT 2
13 13 13 --  
-- 14 14 auto feed IN 3
15 15 32 Error OUT
16 16 31 init IN
-- 17 36 select IN 3
14 18 33 twisted pair ret Gnd
14 19 19 twisted pair ret Gnd
14 20 21 twisted pair ret Gnd
14 21 23 twisted pair ret Gnd
14 22 25 twisted pair ret Gnd
14 23 27 twisted pair ret Gnd
14 24 29 twisted pair ret Gnd
14 25 30 twisted pair ret Gnd

Note 1.  Note the six negative-logic signals.  (Their overbars are not very visible.)
Note 2.  These pins on my workbench computer's IDC are not connected.
Note 3.  I did not connect these, but they have DIP switches in the printer so external connection is not always necessary.

Columns 2 & 3 represent the standard parallel printer cable.  Columns 1 & 2 represent a ribbon cable I made up, but you might want to just put a DB-25 on your computer board for the purpose.

From the other things on this page, you're probably getting the idea by now of how to connect this to a 6522 VIA or even through shift registers.  (After all, a line printer is another thing that's not exactly fast.  Putting it on the VIA's SR is not going to be a burden speedwise!)  To get as many things on the first VIA on the workbench computer, I even have to split the eight bits of printer data between five bits of port A (shared with the LCD and keypad, as shown in the schematic in the display section above) and three bits of port B.  (I know it sounds like a mess, but once the software for it is written, it just does its job and you forget all about it.)

I might post code later.  All I have now is Forth code from various projects—not a single one in 6502 assembly.


Digital-to-analog converters

The DAC0808 is a simple, fast, 8-bit multiplying D/A converter that has been around for decades.  I have one on my workbench computer that gets used to do everything from setting power supply voltages, to simulating loads, to using it as a volume control (it is a multiplying DAC!), to arbitrary waveform generation, to doing audio sampling at rates of tens of thousands of samples per second.  Its settling time to ½lsb is 150ns (right—not µs, but ns).  Wanna see how easy the software is?  Suppose you have it on port B of a VIA, and have the value in the 6502's accumulator.  Just write the value to the port like this:

        STA   VIA_PB
That's it.  No separate .asm file for this one.  (Just make sure you've put the port bits in output mode, by storing $FF to the data-direction register.)  Here's the circuit:

DAC0808 D/A converter schematic
Notes:

  1. As shown, an input of 0 gives 0V output, and $FF gives 5V*255/256 output (ie, 4.98V if your supply really is 5V even).  It is quite accurate throughout the range.  Each step is about 19.5mV.

  2. The ±10V shown is not critical at all.  I keep it in the neighborhood of ±9V, but the actual value does not affect the accuracy.  The op amp also uses it to perform well all the way down to ground on the output, and to output $FF which is 5V*255/256.  The DAC needs a negative voltage anyway, and using the higher voltages makes the op amp work better than 5V rail-to-rail ones do.  (Remember it was mentioned above for some supertwist LCDs' backplane bias, and I said it's good to have the ± voltages for several things.  This is one.)  I tell how to derive these voltages from 5V farther down, under "Non-typical power-supply circuits."

  3. Purists would probably want you to use 1% resistors, but I've found the 5% carbon-film ones are usually not more than 1% off anyway.  The important thing is not so much their absolute value, but their matching.  As shown here, the 5V power supply is the reference; and if your +5V is within 1% or better, half lsb which would be 10mV, congratulations.  If it's not close enough for your liking, you can adjust for power-supply inaccuracy by trimming R5.

  4. C1 and C2 filter out noise that's on the power-supply line so the reference for the DAC is quiet.

  5. The reference voltage input on the right end of R3 usually is left unconnected, but you can use the DAC as a multiplier for that voltage, even tens of thousands of times per second, so you can put not only DC on it but also an AC signal if you want.

  6. For applications where you don't need much speed (like for setting a power-supply voltage), nearly any op amp that can work with the voltage range will do.  I started with a common LM358 dual, but later changed to an LT1124 (also a dual) which is about ten times as good in every way (but very expesive, which was ok since I only needed one).  The LM358 has a little crossover distortion when trying to drive the 2.2K R5 at higher speeds unless you bias the output pretty heavily with a pull-down resistor.  I use the other half of the dual op amp in my A/D converter circuit (which I will present further down).

  7. C4 is not critical either.  With the 2.2K R5, 330pF puts the -3dB frequency at about 220kHz (actually a little lower since the op amp is not perfect).  Since there's a little capacitance in the circuit at the inverting input, just make it standard practice to put in at least 22pF or so to get rid of the pole that could otherwise make the op amp oscillate.  The 220-ohm resistor at the output serves a similar purpose.  Since the op amp's output does have some resistance, capacitive loading produces another pole, and the feedback circuit gets its signal source phase-shifted accordingly.  If the capacitive loading is heavy enough, you can lose enough phase margin for the op amp to oscillate.  The 220-ohm load is enough to prevent that under all load conditions, and, at the operating frequencies of interest, probably won't have any effect on the circuit you're driving.  Actually, depending on the op amp selected, you might be able to go as low as 100 ohms or even less.

  8. Note the single-point ground connection.  If the circuit you're driving with the DAC is not practically shoulder-to-shoulder close to this circuit, it would be good to put ferrite beads over the pair of wires, voltage output and analog ground (labeled AGND in the diagram), ie, two wires through the same bead, to cut common-mode signals and force the analog ground wire to carry the equal and opposite return current.  You can see a bunch of ferrite beads in the first picture on the primer page here for construction for AC performance.  The ferrite bead I use for so many things is the Fair-Rite 2643000801 which is 0.3" long and 0.3" diameter and has a minimum impedance of 50 ohms at 25MHz and approximately 90 ohms at 100MHz.  Remember that even a 2MHz square wave has substancial harmonic content around 25MHz.  This bead has a few ohms' impedance even at 1MHz, and of course does not affect DC.  If you put two wires through it, differential-mode siganls, ie, where equal but opposite currents flow in the two wires, will be unaffected.  In fact, the ferrite bead will try to make the two AC currents equal and opposite.  The bead is $.08 each in singles at Mouser.  Keeping digital noise out of data converters is a science, but fortunately not too difficult for 8-bit.  The various A/D and D/A manufacturers have lots of ap. notes on it, and each data sheet will have a little on it.
What I have not shown here is the sockets for plug-in modules for anti-alias filters and other signal conditioning.  (Depending on what you're doing, you may not initially have any need for that.)  I have various places to connect to the outside world.  I put 3.5mm plugs on the front panel which I can plug audio straight in, other projects have been plugged into the module sockets, and some went through the board-edge connector at the back.  The speaker amplifier can be switched between A/D input and D/A output, both post-anti-alias filters.

If you need more sharing of VIA ports, like to be able to use the same VIA bits to talk to something else without changing the DAC's output, you could add an 8-bit latch such as the 74HC373 or '374 and use just one extra bit from the VIA to trigger the latch after putting the desired bit pattern out the 8-bit port.  The point of this particular DAC however is speed; so if you want to go with serial (which is much slower) to further extend the number of things the existing VIA pins can interface to, you might as well go with the I²C MAX520 or 521 discussed below which have 4 and 8 DACs and need virtually no support parts.

This DAC0808 BTW is the same converter I used on my analog oscilloscope raster graphics circuit to take the counters' outputs and drive the X and Y inputs of the oscilloscope.

In the automated test equipment I designed, built, and programmed at my last job in about 1990, I used DAC1220's which are nearly the same but in 12-bit, in an 18-pin DIP.  I used these to set power supply and other voltages and to control signal amplitudes.  The DAC1220 is apparently no longer made, but the AD7541A is nearly the same thing, somewhat improved.


The MAX520 quad I²C 8-bit DAC in 16-pin DIP I mentioned earlier needs virtually no external components, so there's really no circuit to draw.  There's simple Forth code to drive it about 2/3 of the way down the GENRLI2C.ASM file which starts with general I²C-driver 6502 assembly code.  I might recommend the MAX521 in 20-pin DIP instead though, since it has 8 DACs instead of 4 and it has output buffer amps so it can drive a decent load without the output voltage drooping seriously.  The 520's outputs should only drive high-impedance loads.


For a super-simple 9-level D/A converter, remember you can use the VIA's SR data output as mentioned earlier:


          VIA SR output D/A

shown with a little more explanation at http://wilsonminesco.com/6502interrupts/index.html#3.3 in my interrupts primer (where this figure came from).  Driver code is too simple for a separate file, so here it is:


INIT_SR_DAC:
        LDA   #00010000B   ; Set SR to shift out free-running at
        STA   VIA_ACR      ; T2 rate.  (T2CH does not get used.)
        STZ   VIA_T2CL     ; Zero the T2 counter's low-byte latch for fastest
        RTS                ; possible shift rate, to make it the easiest to filter.
 ;------------------

_3BIT_TBL:                                     ; "DFB" in C32 is "DeFine Byte."
        DFB   00000000B, 00010000B, 00100010B  ; The point here is to distribute the bits
        DFB   01010010B, 10101010B, 10101101B  ; such that the toggling frequency is kept
        DFB   11011101B, 11101111B, 11111111B  ; as high as possible for easy filtering.

WR_SR_DAC:                 ; Start with number in the range of 0-9 (inclusive) in A.
        TAX                ; Skip the TAX if you already have the number in X.
        LDA   _3BIT_TBL,X  ; Get the distributed-bits pattern from the table,
        STA   VIA_SR       ; and write it to our make-shift D/A converter.
        RTS
 ;------------------

This is a Forth-to-assembly translation of code I used when I did DTMF output with this method.  Worked like a charm.  Believe it or not, it worked quite well for speech too, if the dynamic range is really compressed.  I don't remember trying it for music, but I can't imagine it would be very enjoyable!  Using a CMOS 6522 (65c22) will make give a higher, more-consistent output voltage, since CMOS can pull all the way up to the 5V (unlike NMOS), and with a lower impedance.  The SR always finishes sending out a byte before starting the next, so you don't have to worry about glitches from not timing the write just right.  And again, this SR mode keeps shifting the same value out over and over, free-running, until you write another one to it.  It uses T2 to govern the shift rate, so T1 is left available to produce interrupts for the sampling rate.


Digital potentiometer

Related to D/A converters (especially multiplying ones), I have used the National Semiconductor LM1973 (unfortunately now discontinued, as I found out in Dec 2020) 3-channel digital potentiometer in a product.  Working Forth code and an untested translation to 6502 assembly is in UPOT.ASM.


Analog-to-digital converters

The MAX153 is a half-flash, 8-bit A/D converter with internal track-and-hold, and it's almost fast enough to just read as a memory location.  I have one on my workbench computer that gets used to do everything from measure voltages and current in circuits, including as a digital oscilloscope, to temperature, to audio sampling at rates of tens of thousands of samples per second.  It has various modes of operation, but I set it up this way:

MAX153 D/A converter schematic
Notes:

  1. As shown, an input of 0V gives an outut of 0, and an input of 5V*255/256 gives $FFH.  Each step is about 19.5mV.

  2. The ±10V shown is just for the op amp power supply and is not critical at all.  I keep it in the neighborhood of ±9V.  If you want to try to use a rail-to-rail 5V op amp, be my guest.  I always have several things that use the higher voltages, so I think it's just as well to have them available than to try to avoid everything outside of +5V.  I tell how to derive these voltages from 5V further down, under "Non-typical power-supply circuits."

  3. The op amp bias resistors shown are for when you want capacitive coupling.  The trimmer pot is for adjusting the zero-input-signal output value.  As shown, you can get approximately $0C above and below the $7F value.  You can typically go a little more one side than the other depending on your op amp choice, because of its input bias current.

  4. For applications where you don't need much speed (like for measuring temperature), nearly any op amp that can work with the voltage range will do.  I started with a common LM358 dual, but later changed to an LT1124 (also a dual) which is about ten times as good in every way (but very expesive, which was ok since I only needed one).  The latter was more for the D/A (presented above) than this A/D.

  5. The ferrite bead shown on pin 12, along with the .1µF capacitor there, keep digital noise on the power supply line from affecting the readings.  If you use a separate voltage reference, this may not be an issue.  The ferrite bead I use for so many things is the Fair-Rite 2643000801 which is 0.3" long and 0.3" diameter and has a minimum impedance of 50 ohms at 25MHz and approximately 90 ohms at 100MHz.  Remember that even a 2MHz square wave has substancial harmonic content around 25MHz.  The impedance at even 1MHz will, along with the .1µF capacitor, give a lot of attenuation.  There might be a temptation to use a resistor instead, but that would affect the reading a lot, since the ADC may have as little a 1K between Vref+ and Vref-.  In that case, even a 4.7-ohm resistor would change it by 1 lsb.  The ferrite might have more than that at 2MHz but with no DC resistance.  It costs $.08 each in singles at Mouser.

  6. The reference voltage output on the right is usually left unconnected, but may occasionally have a use, as in ratiometric measurements.

  7. The .01µF capacitor and 330-ohm resistor at the ADC's input have a -3dB point of 48kHz, so it's essentially flat throught the entire audio range.  The 330-ohm resistor also helps preserve the phase margin on the op amp to keep it stable when there's a capacitive load which would otherwise produce a pole.

  8. The Schottky diodes just help protect the ADC's input from excessive current from voltages outside the 0-5V range.  I used 1N5817's because I had a lot from making switching power supplies.

  9. Consider pins 10 & 11 to be the center of the star of the grounding system for the ADC.  For best AC performance, capacitor leads should be as short as you can make them, since lead length adds inductance.  If the circuit you're connecting to the ADC is not practically shoulder-to-shoulder close to this circuit, it would be good to put ferrite beads over the pair of wires, voltage output and analog ground (labeled AGND in the diagram), ie, two wires through the same bead, to cut common-mode signals and force the analog ground wire to carry an equal and opposite return current.  You can see a bunch of ferrite beads in the first picture on the primer page here for construction for AC performance.  Keeping digital noise out of data converters is a science, but fortunately not too difficult for 8-bit.  The various A/D and D/A manufacturers have lots of ap. notes on it, and each data sheet will have a little on it.


The code to set it up and to read it is:


INIT_AtoD: LDA   #00001110B
           TSB   VIA_PCR     ; Set CA2 high.  I put the CS\ of the A/D on CA2.
           STZ   VIA_DDRB    ; Make all bits of Port B to be inputs.
                             ; First reading after power-up is inaccurate, so get it out of the way, by continuing:
READ_AtoD: LDA   #00000010B  ; No entry requirements for READ_AtoD.  At end, A/D result is in Y.
           TRB   VIA_PCR     ; Set the CS\ of the A/D low.
           LDY   VIA_PB      ; Read the A/D result.  At 5MHz phase-2 clock freq, you'll need one NOP between TRB & LDY.
           TSB   VIA_PCR     ; Set the CS\ of the A/D back high.
           RTS
 ;-----------------------

What I have not shown above is the sockets for plug-in modules for anti-alias filters and other signal conditioning.  (Depending on what you're doing, you may not initially have any need for that.)  I have various places to connect to the outside world.  I put 3.5mm plugs on the front panel which I can plug audio straight in, other projects have been plugged into the module sockets, and some went through the board-edge connector at the back.  The monitor speaker amplifier can be switched between A/D input and D/A output, both post-anti-alias filters.

I originally had an ADC0820 in the circuit which is nearly pin-compatible, but later went to the faster MAX153.  (I needed more NOPs with the ADC0820.)  It required very minimal change to the circuit.  Edit, 7/16/22:  I was just shopping for more parts, and found that the MAX153 has gotten super expensive, like $24US!  The ADC0820 is one-quarter to one-third the price.  The MAX114 seems to be the same thing inside as the MAX153 but is about half the price and yet has four input channels.  The MAX118 is the same thing for eight channels instead of four.  I'm finding that all the fast A/D converters are expensive now.  My purpose for the '153 is speed, and getting exact timing on the readings; so if you don't need the speed but you want more resolution, you you could use SPI or I²C A/D converters, perhaps putting them in SPI-10 or I2C-6 or 65SIB devices you plug into those ports on your computer.

For a home project I have not done yet, I piggy-backed a second MAX153 to get two in the space of one   (but see my 7/16/22 update note above about the MAX114 which is a newer version, 4-channel and yet cheaper, and the MAX118 which is the 8-channel version):

        two MAX153's on a 20-pin DIP header

(BTW, you can see a lot of stacking of different ICs, sometimes to extremes, in the forum topic "OT: stacked (DIP) chips.")  My double MAX153 above only takes one extra VIA pin to interface it, for the second CS.  The data bits' connections are common.


A note about A/D and D/A jitter (and other performance considerations)

"Jitter" is the term used to refer to the slop, or uncertainty, in timing of the sampling of a changing signal.  (Please note that this is separate from the matter of sampling rate and preventing aliasing.)  Ideally the samples come at a very exact rate; for example, if you sample at 10,000 times per second, you really want them to be exactly 0.1ms apart (add as many zeroes after it as you like), every time, whether you just want a faithful reproduction upon playback, or you actually want to do some mathematical analysis on the set of samples (which I have done many times, with the fast fourier transform, or FFT for short).  If the sample timing keeps "rattling around" within the jitter window, and the signal changes fast enough to experience a substancial change within that jitter window, noise and distortion result.  The following sketch illustrates the problem:

jitter illustration

With something like an I²C data converter, the exact time of the sample may be difficult to nail down accurately; but we would probably not be using that interface for a signal that changes quickly, let alone for audio.  SPI is considerably faster; but the parallel converters here would offer much better timing for audio if we interface them to a 6502 with timing based on interrupts.

If the sytem clock (ie, Φ2) jitter and aperture jitter are negligible such that variations in interrupt latency make up basically the whole picture, the total RMS jitter for record-playback is the square root of the sum of the RMS record jitter squared and the playback jitter squared:

      record-playback jitter accumulation equation                                CodeCogs - An Open Source Scientific Library

6502 instructions are mostly 2-6 cycles (7 is rare) and the average is 4.  (Caveat: See the forum topic "A taken branch delays interrupt handling by one instruction.")  Since all instructions take at least two cycles, an interrupt could hit during those last two on any of them; but as the cycle count increases, there are fewer and fewer instructions where an interrupt could more and more cycles before the end.  With an equal distribution of 2-, 3-, 4-, 5-, and 6-cycle instructions (which is perhaps not the safest assumption), the median time from interrupt to the end of the instruction execution is 2 cycles, and the RMS jitter is 1.8 cycles for record and 1.8 again for playback, meaning a total (if you need both) of a little over 2.5 cycles.  At 5MHz that's 500ns.  The S/N ratio is:

     

where f is the analog input frequency, and tj is the RMS jitter time, or 500ns in this case.  So at 4kHz input frequency, the noise resulting from jitter will be about 38dB below the amplitude of the signal, which means you're good to a maximum of about 6 bits (ratio of 80), even if you used a 16-bit converter.  This applies no matter how high you get the sampling rate, even if over 100,000 samples per second, because jitter is separate from sampling rate.  If you wanted to get that S/N ratio at 16kHz analog input frequency, with the sampling being interrupt-driven on a 6502, you'd need a 20MHz Φ2 (with no wait states), which is about as fast as you can reliably get with current-production, off-the-shelf 6502's.

If you don't plan to play it back, like if you only record in order to do a mathematical analysis on it (as I've done many times), you're only dealing with the recording jitter; so the 4kHz input frequency for a 5MHz Φ2 and the jitter-induced noise being 38dB down from the signal becomes 5.66kHz.  Since I was doing spectrum analysis on aircraft and vehicle noise coming through headset microphones whose frequency response took a nosedive at 4kHz, it worked out fine.  (I also used a 5th-order 5.6kHz anti-alias filter.)

That's really not bad for an 8-bit converter, considering that audio amplitudes tend to be very inconsistent and you probably won't be able to keep the signal in the top 1½ bits of the converter's resolution anyway.  As the top end of your input signal's frequency spectrum drops, so will the problems resulting from jitter.  The maximum S/N ratio you can get with a perfect 8-bit converter and no jitter is 50dB (from 8bits * 6.02dB + 1.76dB).  (That's while there's signal.  With no signal, the converter's output remains constant, with no noise at all if the reference voltage is quiet; so it's not like cassettes which gave tape hiss between songs.)

Without stopping the 65c02 using the WAIt instruction for the immediate interrupt response it affords (at the expense of doing something useful while it's waiting), you can still reduce the jitter in an interrupt-driven sampling time driven by a timer like the VIA's T1, by putting code in the ISR to read T1 and see how many cycles ago it timed out and adjusting the delay before doing the next data conversion.  It makes for more delay in the ISR, but you can make that delay consistent, getting rid of the jitter.  I will post code later.

There's a tutorial on jitter and ENB (effective number of bits) here, and an excellent lecture and demonstration of what is and is not important in audio, and down-to-earth proofs of the "golden ears" baloney, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYTlN6wjcvQ.  Yes, it's on YouTube which compresses the audio and loses information, but he gives the URL where you can download the raw wave files if you want to, otherwise see what he does with various experiments right there.

If you are sampling AC signals, it would be expected that you have at least a basic understanding of the Nyquist frequency and aliasing.  I might comment however that there are times that it is appropriate to undersample if you are dealing with a limited bandwidth of for example 200-220kHz.  You don't necessarily have to sample much above 40kSPS; but the jitter still needs to be suitable for a 220kHz signal, not 20kHz.  Just timing the samples off of timer interrupts on a 6502 won't get you there.  But outside of that, (read on...)

How many samples do I need? and Do I need smoothing to produce a clean waveform?  The answer might surprise you.  Let's say you try to synthesize a sine wave with only 32 samples per cycle, or 8 samples per quarter cycle (90°).  With no filtering, the first major harmonic distortion products will be the 31st and 33rd harmonics, down about 30dB from the fundamental.  IOW, for a fundamental frequency above 600Hz, these will be out of the hearing range.  The hottest harmonic distortion product below that is the 5th harmonic at about 54dB down from the fundamental.  For a 16-sample sine wave, ie, only 4 samples per 90° (does that seem atrocious?), the first major harmonic distortion products are the 15th and 17th harmonics, down about 24db below the fundamental.  The hottest harmonic distortion product below that is the 7th harmonic, at about 55dB down from the fundamental.  If you go up to 64 samples per cycle, which is 16 samples per 90°, the first major harmonic distortion products are the 63rd and 65th harmonics at about 36dB below the fundamental.  If you want to filter it, it will be easy, not requiring a many-order brick-wall filter, as long as you're not nearing the Nyquist frequency.

How many bits do I really need?  As mentioned above, an 8-bit converter can theoretically reach a SNR of 50dB when signal is present, and have an output as quiet as that of a 24-bit converter if there's no signal, since the number won't be changing.  There were some fine-sounding music cassette tapes before CDs took over, and their SNR was virtually no better than what an 8-bit converter can give you; yet the cassettes' frequency response and distortion at high record levels were quite inferior to what you can get with a good 8-bit converter and adequate sampling rate!  I know it's unlikely anyone will ever use 8-bit recording for music for enjoyment, but this might put things in perspective.  For things like machine control and measurements in test equipment, you will have to determine how accurate you need them, and whether external scaling and offsets will let you get by with fewer bits than you might think.  There is some discussion of this in the first quarter of the front page about large look-up tables for hyperfast, accurate, 16-bit scaled-integer math.  I'm definitely not against using converters of 12, 14, 16, or more bits when they are right for the application (in fact, I'm about to start shopping for a multi-channel SPI A/D of at least 12 bits), but I always like to point out what might be a pleasant unexpected discovery of what can be done with less.


Some tricks from Jeff Laughton (Dr Jefyll on 6502.org's forum)

His website is http://laughtonelectronics.com/.  He has given me permission to publish these here.

Ultra-fast output port using 65C02 illegal instructions:
This is a 5-bit parallel output port for 65c02 that uses the illegal op codes (65C02 NOPs which are only informally but not thoroughly documented by the manufacturers) in the _3 and _B columns to get single-cycle output, twice as fast as the otherwise 2-clock minimum for instructions, and you don't need extra instructions to first load a register.  However, all five bits will be affected at once per the illegal op code used, unlike the 4- and 8-bit I/Os further down.


See the description on the forum for more info.



Get 4 bits of 65c02 single-cycle output, plus 4 bits of input requiring a single cycle to conditionally set the oVerflow flag to branch on afterward.  (For the input, do a CLV first)

This one (and the next one, below) lets you address one bit at a time, independently of the others, unlike the 5-bit one above.


Get 8 bits of 65c02 single-cycle output (see the note on the usability of bit 6), plus 8 bits of input requiring a single cycle to conditionally set the oVerflow flag to branch on afterward.  (For the input, do a CLV first.)

This one also lets you address one bit at a time, independently of the others.  Note again that if you have a 65c02 made by WDC (as opposed to Rockwell, GTE, CMD, Synertek, etc.), the added STP (SToP) and WAI (WAIt) op codes ($DB and $CB, respectively) make output bit 6 usable only to indicate that there was a STP instruction executed.  It will normally come out of reset as low; then if a STP is executed, it goes high and stays high until there's a reset.  Since STP stops the processor, a subsequent WAI will not happen before there's a reset.  Neither IRQ nor NMI will wake it up from a STP.  If you would prefer to give up input bit 6 rather than output bit 6, you can use this version instead.



Re-mapping Op-codes (eg: to create virtual instructions)
This causes illegal op codes (or any opcodes you choose!) to trigger a BReaK or other opcode, leading to clever software (supplied by you) to simulate new instructions.

See the description on the forum for more info.



Non-typical power-supply circuits run by the 65c22 VIA and digital components

In some of our products, I have needed a higher voltage at negligible current for FET bias, well outside the power rails in order to get a good pinch-off for JFETs or saturation for MOSFETs, for controlling 12V analog signals.  With a microcontroller there, it was natural to use a pin or two to to output a square wave to run a voltage multiplier, and then I could make the high voltage go off or on under software control.  One way to do it with a 65c22 is the following:

     

Notes:



I have used charge pumps for up to 8 or 10 watts.  Sometimes it's not very efficient, but it may be worth it anyway.  Here's a circuit I breadboarded recently to get -9V from +5V.  This circuit puts out over -19V with a very light load, but I put the output through an LM337T adjustable negative linear regulator set to put out -9V at up to -200mA from this.

     

Notes:

There are lots of ways to do the above, and I can't cover them all; so if you have an idea for a different one, about all I can say is to breadboard it and try it to see if you can get the needed voltage and current from it.  If you want my opinion on a circuit idea, you can email me at wilsonminesBdslextremeBcom (replacing the B's with @ and .).


For other needs of doubling or negating a voltage, sometimes the 7660-related 8-pin DIP ICs are appropriate.  These are capacitive charge pumps.  There are many variations, each with their own strength; for example, some have a higher maximum operating voltage, some have higher operating current, and some even have regulators built in.  See the data sheets for the various operating modes.  Ones I have tried are (with a brief description of the part and a few actual numbers from my own experience with it) are:


Switching regulators (which use inductors), whether buck or boost, are typically a better way than charge pumps to do power supplies, due to efficiency, particularly when regulation is needed; but they tend to do poorly on breadboards, and their PC-board layout is not for beginners.  (The one I've used most in our commercial products is the MAX732 which allows you to start with anywhere from 4V to 9.3V input and get 12V out.  Another is the MAX669 which let us start with a pair of AA batteries and get 12V out.)  One way around the difficulty that switching regulators present for the hobbyist is to use integrated switching regulators which put all the difficult stuff in a small pre-made module, sometimes with the same pinout as the popular 7805 for example.  I've used the Power Trends 78SR112 and 78ST105 three-pin 12V and 5V switching regulator modules in prducts.  They worked great but unfortunately TI took over Power Trends and discontinued these.  Pololu Robotics and Electronics, MicroPower Direct, and Traco Power are three other suppliers of switching-regulator modules.





< I realize now I should add a circuit for a complete modem for storing data and programs on tape, since even at this late date (2022), we still frequently see interest on the forum.  Although tape is pretty much gone, people are using their cell phones and other digital devices to record audio. >


workbench equip <--Previous

last updated Oct 16, 2023