This year’s installment of the Vintage Computer Festival Europa is - again - a special one for us: VCFe 24.0 will be focused around “50 years of 6502”!
So be prepared for lots of 6502 related and also unrelated exhibitions and talks!
We will of course be there, too, presenting Marko’s Pacman implementation - the only one for 6502 based systems that replicates the look and the behaviour (including bugs) of the original arcade almost completely.
We have indeed moved again. As of now, our homepage at www.steckschwein.de is no longer being hosted by Github Pages. Instead, we are now being hosted by www.codeberg.org.
Codeberg is a non-profit, community-led effort that provides Git hosting and other services for free and open source projects. We believe that a non-profit organization is a much better home for our project than a multi-billion-dollar multinational corporation based in the US.
Our plan is to move all our repositories from GitHub to codeberg.org.
The 28C256 EEPROM, which holds the BIOS, has been our go-to choice since the early breadboard days. Before that, we relied on EPROMs, which required UV erasure before every upgrade—a time-consuming and inconvenient process. Switching to an EEPROM significantly improved our workflow, reducing turnaround time.
However, the 28C256 has a couple of drawbacks:
Because of these limitations, using ROM routines isn’t ideal from a performance standpoint. As a result, the BIOS’s sole function is to load the steckOS bootloader from an SD card into RAM and start it.
After introducing BASIC and Forth as interpreted languages on the Steckschwein, it’s time to add another unique and productive language—Brainf*ck.
For those unfamiliar, Brainf*ck (or Brainf**k) is an “esoteric” programming language created in 1993 by Urban Müller, the founder of Aminet. You can read more about it on Wikipedia.
A compact Brainfck interpreter can be found here, originally developed for the Apple ][. This version served as the foundation for the Steckschwein adaptation. The Apple ][ ROM calls were replaced with custom code, and the interpreter loop was optimized using 65C02-specific instructions, making it smaller and faster. Although performance gains in Brainf*ck aren’t critical, the improvements are noteworthy.
We are reflecting on a very special VCFe, as it marked the 10th (or 10 1/2th) birthday of the Steckschwein.
Reconnecting with old friends, making new friends, and celebrating and eating our 12 cycle muffin NOPslide together were all incredibly enjoyable experiences.
Additionally, Marko allowed an exciting sneak peek into his nearly complete Pacman implementation, the first ever on a 6502 that closely replicates the behavior of the original Namco Pacman Arcade.
The 23th annual European Vintage Computer Festival will take place on 7./8. September 2024!
The special focus of this year’s VCFe is _50 years of 8080 and 6800 with a lot of exhibitions and talks around those CPUs.
Also, the Steckschwein will celebrate it’s 10 year anniversary (more like 10 1/2 now) with you!
We will be showing all Steckschwein incarnations from its humble and nameless beginnings on a breadboard to the current 512k SBC version! Also, we will host a talk about the most important milestones and challenges in the last 10 years, and of course we’d like to celebrate!