Paula Maddox's LT6502 Is the Compact MOS 6502-Powered Netbook From Your '80s Dreams

Maker and self-described "electronics/synth nerd" Paula Maddox has built a laptop with a difference: it's based around the MOS Technology 6502 eight-bit microprocessor, as famously powering Commodore and Apple's early home computers among many other devices.

"Yes, I know I'm crazy, but I figured why not," Maddox writes of the project, known as the LT6502. "I'm enjoying working the PC6502 project but having a little tower of PCBs on the sofa isn't the best. I've learned a lot about 3D printing and there is a lot I would change. But overall, I’m happy with it. It’s a bit of a chonker but that honestly doesn’t bother me."

The LT6502 builds on Maddox's earlier PC6502 project, which uses a PC104-like design to stack PCBs into a working MOS 6502 microcomputer. The LT6502 takes that core concept and flattens it out into something suitable for inclusion into an admittedly chunky 3D-printed laptop housing, complete with integrated display and keyboard that close together clamshell-style for portability.

The heart of the system is a Western Design Center (WDC) 65C02, a readily-available MOS 6502 equivalent, with 46kB of RAM — slightly less than a Commodore 64, which was named for its 64kB of RAM — and an extended BASIC interpreter in ROM, featuring high-resolution full-color graphics. There's a WDC 65C22 versatile interface adapter (VDC) handling timer work an input/output, while a modern 9" flat-screen LCD display and compact keyboard provide input and output — with a character-based LED display as a secondary output.

"What would I do differently," Maddox asks of the build in its current incarnation. "Start the design with the keybed, it's a bit squeezed in (I'm not happy with the placement of a few keys). Spend longer sourcing a thinner battery (this is 3× 18650s) Use an FFC [Flat Flexible Circuit] for the display (this would make the display portion about 10mm thinner straight away!) Reduce the smaller fiddly bits in the case, a lot of the problems I had were down to me trying to print things with 0.1mm resolution. Add more clips for the case so it doesn't gape in places."

More information is available in Maddox's Mastodon thread, while 3D print files, schematics and PCB design files, and software source code are all available on GitHub under the permissive MIT license.