A 6502 CPU for the RC2014 Part 2b

Readers of Part 2 of this series of articles on getting the 6502 CPU to run on the RC2014 will recall that I was having trouble getting the standard RC2014 Serial I/O module to work reliably.

The latter is based on the Motorola 68B50 ACIA which uses the same bus architecture as the 6502. So compatibility should have been a slam dunk.

That it was not was entirely due to human error: mine.

I had correctly re-wired pin 14 (the E clock pin) of the 68B50 to pin 4 (TX_CLK) which is itself derived from the Phi2 signal of the 6502. All good there.

However, by doing that, I had removed the IORQ signal from the address decoding process! This meant that I was randomly reading and (worst) writing to the 68B50 while read/writing memory!

The 6502 should select the 68B50 only when IORQ was valid.

This is solved by removing the M1 signal from the CS0 pin of the 68B50. Remember that the M1 signal is unique to the Z80. In that world, you want it to be high ("1") to validate any I/O cycle. On the 6502 CPU board, we had tied this to VCC.

Now that the CS0 pin of the 68B50 is available, we can use it with IORQ. The latter is active low while the CS0 is active high. Pin 2 of the 74HCT04 is the inverse of IORQ and can be used directly to validate CS0.

So we keep the 74HCT04 and connect its pin 2 to CS0 (pin 8 of the 68B50).

Voici:

And it all works!!

Conclusion
- If you want to explore the world of the 6502 CPU with a RC2014, you can reuse all the standard modules (RAM, ROM, Serial I/O) with a little bit of re-wiring work.
- All you need is the 6502 CPU board, a 6502 CPU and a number of other easy to get components.