W65C02SXB : WDC to the rescue

 

I am a little nervous about my 6502 system.  I moved beyound the "use wires to connect hardware on breadboard" stage so time ago and I am more intereseted in software development now.  In fact I am aiming to run C and BASIC programs on my system next.  Underneath the hardware is working but subject to the vagaries of bad connections or deficiencies in programming due to my incomplete understanding.  The recent increase in clock speed (or some undiscovered unknown issue) has led to the system becoming frustrating to work with and almost unuseable.

Whilst considering buying a circuit board to formalise my hardware (for example from dbuchwald) I came across a development board from WDC  which perfectly matches my requirement. It was released in 2014, apparently as an educational board and is still available. WDC have been the main player keeping 6502 hardware ecosystem alive for many years now so a board from them is likely to be good.

The W65C02SXB  has a 65C02, ROM, RAM, VIA and ACIA just like mine.  Obviously it has the advantage that all connections are in place and should be reliable.
The clock runs at 8MHz s the board should be significantly faster than my existing breadboard version.
The second enhancement is that all necessary pins, including data bus address bus and 65C02 control pins are available on headers so are easily accessible for attaching devices / peripherals.

I ordered one immediately from Mouser in the UK and it was delivered by Fedex five days later after an epic journey from Grand Prairie, Texas.

There is a getting started project provided by WDC which demonstrates how to assemble (WDC02AS), link (WDCLN) and run a program to flash the onboard X LEDs.  The program is loaded and run using the debugger (WDCDB) which shows you the assembler source, memory variables / registers and allows you to single step or run through a program.  This is magnificent and provides a whole new world, hopefully making it much easier to develop code.

A second project  providing very detailed instructions is available from Instructables to flash an external LED attached to a VIA pin.  The executable image is loaded via TIDE (Terbium IDE) into memory and can then be run using the debugger.

These WDC tools make software development a very different experience from my DIY environment and hopefully speed up the process.  All I need to do is attach appropriate hardware to the board connectors and start development.  It looks like WDC and instructables hoped for other projects to be based on the board but I haven't seen many, there are a few references on 6502.org which I can follow up.