Hello from South Texas
Posted: Fri Feb 25, 2022 6:47 am
Hi, my name is Kenneth!
I am coming here a bit shocked that this project flew under my radar, though the last 3ish years have been busy and hectic so also not surprised.
I love the 6502 and FPGAs and had planned to make a solid attempt at building my own 6502 based computer, but between career changes, getting my degree, and the pandemic that hasn't quite happened. It's even harder to consider that project now that I've learned how amazing this project is.
I started breaking the family windows 3.1 computer at about 5 or 6, so I never really got to experience the glory days of my favorite cpu. I started building my own gaming PCs around 2000. I had dabbled a smidge with basic on the TI-83 but struggled to learn any "useful" programming. Eventually I started to dabble with Linux around 2007 and started to learn Perl a couple years later.
My journey to take things apart and understand how they work has taken me from LAMP stack tech support, to linux sysadmin, to cloud backend development, to open source server design engineering, to application security consulting and now firmware engineering. I've also taught myself some electrical engineering and HDL design but those skills are definitely less well developed, I rely on my designs using slower speeds and feeds so that I have pretty spacious timing requirements ?
Based on this rant/mini-bio I'm sure y'all can understand the appeal of the X16 to me! I'm hoping I'll be able to find some fun and/or impactful ways to contribute. I'm interested in writing software and designing hardware add-ons for this system ?