Welcome to my website on Búri, my home-build 6502 computer. This page is intended for new users and provides a historical overview of the site and the pages.

What is Búri and why?

Around Christmas 2014 I developed a desire to learn some digital electronics and discover more about how computers actually work. I’m a fairly proficient software developer but most of my work starts a) above the OS and b) from C/C++ upwards. (Although I spend the majority of my time in Python these days.) I had only theoretical knowledge of how an OS works, how to drive hardware and low-level programming without a standard library to help you.

I had played with an Arduino a bit over the past few months and though it was all very fun but that I wanted a big, ambitious long-term project. The Búri project is it.

Find out more on the motivations and aims of the project on the about page.

Timeline

If you’re interested in the history of the project, I’ve put some brief progress notes below in rough chronological order.

January 2014

A bare bones wiring of ROM, RAM and processor onto the same address and data busses. No address decode circuitry and so ROM/RAM hard-wired into “disable” state and data bus hard-wired into NOP instruction ($EA).

The first "free running" protoptype.

March 2014

OS up and running. First prototype serial console working. Enhanced BASIC ported over to Búri in a very limited way.

There’s some discussion on the structure of the OS on the OS page.

April 2014

CPU board design done, PCB manufactured and debugged. Búri lives on something other than a breadboard for the first time.

Find out more about on the CPU board page.

Búri assembled onto the first CPU board.

May 2014

Serial port module created. The first peripheral for Búri! Not much more than a convenience to make adding a 6551 to the bus less error prone.

See all the gory details on the Serial port page.