FPGA MCS6530 RRIOT Replacement Released!
By Paul Sajna February 04 2025
Today I'm excited to announce a project I've been working on for over a year is working and ready for early adopters to play with. Since October 2023, I've been writing FPGA gateware to replicate one of the rarest chips in the retrocomputing space, the MCS6530 released by MOS. This chip is featured in the KIM-1 Computer, released in 1975, as well as several other arcade boards from the 70s and 80s.
My project is called yo6530 and it is available on github here. The board it uses is called the reDIP RIOT and it was designed by Dag Lem, creator of the reSID engine used by the VICE C64 emulator. The board features a Lattice ICE40UP5k FPGA, and the gateware compiles with the opensource toolchains.
I currently have the 6530-002 and 6530-003 variants of this chip functioning well enough to boot my replica KIM-1 with the motherboard designed by Eduardo Casino.
There is more work to do to support different variants of the 6530 in my project, as well as ironing out any bugs found. Contributions are welcome on github.
I have more exciting things coming in the world of KIM-1, so stay tuned! This is just the beginning of what I have coming, but people seem to be taking notice, so I suppose I should make it official.