I built the world’s worst paper tape reader some weeks ago. It works pretty okay on anything with a USR-style port like a KIM-1 clone or a VIC-20.

It at least attempts to live up to the world’s worst name. Paper tape was (and is) an interesting medium. Sure it’s hard to work with and fragile, but it also has the advantage of being slow. I mean, what’s not to like??!!!

Can we get a little more speed from a 6502 than we did last week? Almost certainly.

The memory test we used was a general-purpose one. It’s flexible and reusable. The price is some speed. Let’s try and make it faster.

The test machine for this one

I’m going to rerun the test on a Corsham KIM-1 Clone for a couple of reasons:

• It’s still on my desk from last time
• It’s clocked at EXACTLY 1Mhz
• It has a large block of contiguous memory available if we want it without ROMs , etc. getting in the way.
• The memory expansion is connected directly to the bus, making the “expansion” the same access speed as the built-in memory
• It doesn’t compete with other devices (I’m looking at you, video chips!), so we’re just talking 6502 and memory here.

And by clocked at EXACTLY 1Mhz, assuming the frequency counter in my scope is pretty accurate:

The amazing Gregorio Naçu posted the article title graphic this week to bring attention to the venerable 6502 processor and poke fun at Apple’s M2 chip marketing slides. He’s doing probably the most ambitious single-person Commodore 64 project I know of and has a fantastic blog.

Apple claims the new M2 chip has the following specs.

M2 features Image by Apple via Youtube

We all know that these numbers are probably a little fluffy. Maybe a lot fluffy, and in practical applications, they are probably pretty far off. Benchmarking in a lab is fine, but the numbers rarely reflect real-world performance.

Bill Gates has been a controversial figure in the Computer World for 50 years now.

Back in 1976, he famously (infamously?) wrote a letter bemoaning what he saw as rampant piracy of BASIC. Micro Soft was selling their version of BASIC, which is quite good for a whopping $150. This was fine for a company, but to a "tinker in your garage" person, $150 ($760 or so in 2022) was pretty steep.

Sometimes there’s an absolute joy in doing something the hard way to REALLY understand what’s happening.

I struggled (still struggle) with wrapping my mind around using the display on the KIM-1. The best way (for me anyway) to be motivated to learn something is to have an outcome in mind of what I want to see and work towards that.

Most people who started on the KIM-1 probably spent a fair amount of time in an early book called “The First Book of KIM.” There are several examples of the basics in it, including one way to show memory locations on the display.