ERIC-1: CPU Upgrade

I recently got a delivery of two brand new W65C02S chips from Coltek UK (£9 for two chips including shipping to Finland, not bad!). Now, if this didn't ring a bell, here's some news for you: 6502 microprocessors are still made even today. According to Western Digital Center (WDC), the owners of the 6502 intellectual property, hundreds of millions of 6502s are still made each year. Applications listed on their website includes scanners, toys, dashboards, industrial controllers and all sort of other embedded device, the list is long. Not bad for a CPU made over 30 years ago!

The processor chips I received are from these newer generations of 6502s made by WDC and they have some major improvements over the old Rockwell 6502 I had obtained earlier. First, the W65C02S version has a fully static design, meaning that it no longer loses the state of its internal registers if the clock is stopped. This makes single-stepping and halting the CPU much easier. I no longer have to wait for the clock and R/W to be high when stopping the CPU. Nice!

Also there is a new pin, the bus enable BE pin. When it is low, the address, data and R/W pins go to high impedance state (meaning they are essentially disconnected). This is a really handy feature that can be taken straight away into good use in ERIC-1. The W65C02S can also support clock frequencies up to 14 MHz (max for a Rockwell 6502 is 4 MHz). The breadboarded ERIC-1 probably can't sustain clock frequencies that high due to stray capacitance effects and long wires of the breadboard, but it's good to have that option when I will eventually build this on a PCB. WDC also has implemented a few new opcodes but I haven't taken a closer look at them yet.

The W65C02S is almost a direct replacement for the R65C02 but there are a few important details. The RDY pin is now bidirectional when it used to be only an input pin. There's a new instruction WAI that puts the RDY pin into output mode. Therefore it's important that this pin is not pulled up by connecting it directly to VCC or you could risk causing a short if the pin goes to output state. Instead a pull up resistor needs to be used. Well, I was already doing that so no problem. Another gotcha is the new function of pin 1, which used to be GND on Rockwell but it's now an output pin. According to the datasheet pin 1 is now labeled Vector Pull (VPB) which indicates that a vector location is being addressed during an interrupt sequence. I don't know what it is used for but better leave that unconnected.

With the new BE pin I was hoping to get rid of the 74HC541 buffers that I was using the detach the 6502 from the address bus when the coprocessor needs to access memory. I replaced the old Rockwell with a W65C02S and replaced the buffer chips with jumper wires. I also needed to invert the sense of the BE signal in the ATmega firmware: 74HC541 have OE which is active low, where as BE is active high on the W65C02S. I made the changes and everything seemed to work correctly.

After some time however I noticed a problem. The ATmega refused to be reprogrammed. I'm using an USBTiny programmer to update the ATmega firmware and it is connected to the SPI pins of the ATmega. The same pins are also mapped to I/O port B which is connected to the address bus on the 6502, so I suspected that there must be bus contention going on when the programmer is attempting to reprogram the chip but the 6502 is still driving the same lines for some reason. I disconnected the address lines on the SPI pins and sure the problem went away. This was really strange because the same setup used to work with the 74HC541 buffers. The W65C02S bus drivers must be somehow different than the 74HC4541 buffers or I must have made an error somewhere. It could be some sort of timing issue. According to datasheets the propagation delay for a '541 is typically 10ns and W65C02S BE was max delay of 30ns. Is this enough to make a difference? I doubt it. Anyway, I haven't yet been able to solve this mystery yet.

Even with the internal bus drivers of the WDC chip, one 74HC541 must remain for buffering the CE signal for the SRAM chip (when the ATmega accesses memory it needs to take over the SRAM CE signal and the simplest way to do this is to detach the CE from 6502 using a '541). As a workaround for the reprogramming issue, I routed three address lines through the same 74HC541 that is used to buffer the CE signal.

With these changes the WDC 6502 can now coexists happily with the ATmega1284P. With two chips gone the design now simpler but I'm still not entirely happy with the results. The strange issue with the firmware updates is still an unsolved mystery and routing the three address lines through the buffer feels like a kludge fix. The kind and wise folks of the 6502.org forum have given me some ideas to try to solve this mystery. I've also ordered a Saleae logic analyzer which should come in handy in debugging these kind of problems. I'll probably revisit this issue later armed with proper tools.

The new upgraded ERIC-1 with a W65C02S. Two 74HC541 chips from
the earlier design have been removed.

Updated schematic. The remaining 74HC541 has a dual duty: it takes care
of buffering the SRAM CE signal and also disconnects the three address
 lines A12-A14 when ATmega's firmware is updated.