“Let’s strip away the layers of bloated complexity. Welcome to the CHIPC adventure.”

You probably have an 8-core beast of a processor in your pocket and another one on your desk. But do you really know what happens inside the silicon at every single clock cycle? Driven by a pure love for bare-metal hardware and the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) philosophy, I decided to build my own minimalist computer from scratch.

Its beating heart? The legendary MOS 6502 (specifically, the Rockwell R65C02). No heavy OS, no high-level abstractions. Just pure logic, assembly, and raw silicon.

The Backstory: A One-Year Hiatus

To be completely honest, this project didn’t start yesterday. I actually designed and fully assembled the board a year ago. Back then, I was on fire: I spent hours mapping out the architecture, routing the PCB traces, and soldering the components.

But right after assembling the board, the momentum dropped. The hardware went straight into a drawer, and the project stalled. I realized I had completed the visible part of the iceberg, but I completely missed the most important phase. A custom computer without firmware is just a beautiful, expensive paperweight. The real challenge starts now.

The End Game: Running a Raycaster

I’m digging the project out of its drawer to finally give it life. No more simulations. We are talking custom EEPROM flashing, memory mapping, and low-level bare-metal programming.

But I’m not just aiming for a simple “Hello World” or a blinking LED. The ultimate, crazy goal of this project? Writing and running a 3D raycaster engine directly on this 8-bit machine. If you want to see how far we can push a 6502 processor with clever optimization and minimal resources, you’re in the right place.

Here is what’s coming up in the next devlogs:

EEPROM Programer: create a simple EEPROM programer based on a microcontroller.

The First Boot: Writing the initial bootloader and basic I/O initialization.

Memory Mapping: Figuring out how RAM, ROM, and peripherals will coexist cleanly on the bus.

The Software Stack: Building the foundations to eventually support the raycaster graphics logic.

If you love DIY electronics, retro-engineering, and optimization, stick around.

**CHIPC 2.0 is officially alive. Stay tuned for the next post where we jump straight into the assembly code! **