Form 4 pupil, Sebastian, has embarked on a personal project and has built his own 6502 computer! These chips were used in some of the first personal computers such as the Apple II, Commodore 64, BBC Micro and Nintendo Entertainment System. Here's what he says about his project:

"It is a computer built on breadboards which uses the 6502 processor, used in lots of computers/consoles from the 1970/80s, such as the Atari 5200 and the Commodore PET; a computer many people remember from their childhood. It has 32K of read-only memory which stores programs which I write in 6502 assembly, 16K of RAM and 16 bytes of input output, which allows me to write text to the display.

Although it looks very basic, this computer can actually do everything which a modern computer can although, often, significantly slower. Currently I've written a program which can simply output some text to the screen, and one which calculates the Fibonacci sequence. Although both are incredibly simple programs to write in modern languages, writing in assembly is like playing with fire, as you never know where you've gone wrong, especially on custom hardware.

It runs at a clock speed of 1MHz, but I also built a custom clock which allows for speed adjustment. Although it seems finished, there's a lot more to do! Building a video card, some keyboard functionality? I'm not sure yet, but I do know that it'll be fun to build, no matter what comes next!"