Read how it was done
The story and the record: the arc of the work told once from the start, the long reads, the notebook of plans and reports, and where each project introduces itself.
The arc
How the console came to work, told once from the start. Begin here if you have read none of it.
The console arc, in retrospect
What the sketch asked for, what the chips and the ROMs taught, and what stays for a bench.
/docs/console-arc1,537 words9 links out
The long reads
Each instrument's prose lifted out from under it and set as an article, justified and written to be read end to end.
Tracer: the whole circuit, one half-cycle at a time
Every node and every edge of the MOS 6502 on one screen, at their positions on the die, lit by the transistor-level simulation and re-marked at each half-cycle with everything that moved, beside the program that is running.
/6502/tracer/article5,103 words16 links outThe long reads
Every tool's prose as an article: what the instrument above it is doing, written to be read end to end.
/6502/reading797 words41 links out
The notebook
Every plan written before the work and every report written after it, with the figures they were written from. These are lists: pick an axis and open what it points at.
The notebook by kind
The same documents, sorted by what each one is: plans written before the work, reports written after, procedures, references and records.
/docs/kinds2,298 words61 links outThe console arc's notebook
Every plan and report for the console, grouped by the part they are about: the chips, the signal, the console and the bench. The repositories are the one copy; this site pulls them at build time.
/docs/nes2,394 words62 links outThe documentation tree
The written documentation, with its navigation built from the documents themselves.
/docs2,495 words39 links outWords the reports use
The working words inside the NES reports, in plain sentences: recorded reference runs, checks, fast chips and filters, sabotage runs, what we measured and what we wrote, and the milestone letters.
/docs/words1,394 words9 links out
The two projects
Where the console and the chip each introduce themselves, with the lesson and the recovered visual6502 wiki.
The NES console
A working NES built from our own parts: both chips simulated switch by switch, every connection between them checked against recorded reference runs, and a picture path already tested on a real console.
/nes578 words18 links out6502
A transistor-level MOS 6502, and everything built on it.
/6502381 words20 links outLearn
The lesson: from a token to a published cart, then one instruction followed into the silicon.
/6502/learn538 words22 links outThe visual6502 archive
visual6502.org, recovered from the Internet Archive: the wiki rebuilt from its wikitext, and the die photography made browsable again.
/6502/archive230 words9 links out
The words and the links beside each page are counted off the page itself, by the crawl that keeps the site's map. A page with a lot of words and few links is something to read; one with many links is another list. A page can be behind two doors: an instrument is a thing to watch and a thing to build on. Every address here is the one it has always had.