$29 debug

I've been rather frustrated trying to debug my board with just my Tek scope and a cheap 8 channel USB logic analyzer. So I found a HP 16602A analyzer on Ebay and won the bid at $29!! This model has 104 channels, enough to probe every signal on the board. When I started my career at Intel it was doing hardware validation, and at the time the state of the art LAs on hand to use were the 16600/16700 series frames. Brings back memories...

I love these LAs because they run HP-UX and I can still remote debug over an X window connection from my Linux box.

CommVEx 2016

My wife and I attended CommVEx in Vegas this past weekend.  I had hoped to get the new board working in time, but it didn't happen.  I still brought along the first prototype board for people to take a look at and take for a test drive.

My wife having fun playing Tooth Invaders, one of her favorite games to play on the C64 as a kid.

First Power-On with C64 chips... No Luck Booting...

This was a photo taken during my first attempt to power-on the board 2 weeks ago.  My monitor detected a signal, but only output a black screen.  Looking at the CPU activity, it was attempting to fetch the kernel from ROM, but the data looked incorrect. Onwards to more debug...