[Nick Bild] evidently has a soft spot for the 6502, given that his Vectron65 Plus home computer project uses at least one of them, depending on the add-ons. You see, he hasn’t just made a homebrew computer, he’s also produced multiple expansions. One of which, the VGA Plus Text Mode, has its own 6502 co-processor. He’s also produced two versions of a VGA graphics card capable of 640×480 output. We’re still not 100% sure how many entries we are going to count [Nick]’s work as for the contest, since the graphics cards can be used with just about anything, not just the Vectron65, but we do know they’re strong contenders every one.
We covered the start of the Vectron65 project back in 2019, and it’s only gotten more practical as it has moved off breadboard onto PCB, and into a new version as the 65 Plus with more RAM and GPIO ports. Considering that the original let you game in VR using an add-on we covered, we might have to drop the “nearly” from “nearly practical” when talking about the Plus. Especially when you consider the graphics — we covered first version of 7400-series based VGA graphics card, while the newer V2 differs mostly in doubling the RAM and producing a more stable output. The V2 VGA card can work in tandem with the Text Mode card to write 40-column text to the screen without using up all the 6502 CPU’s cycles, offloading them to the second 6502 on the card with the help of a character ROM. Hey, if Commodore could put a second 6502 in a disk drive, why not? You can check out the whole suite in action in the demo video below. We admit to being particularly tickled by the Hackaday Comment Generator he’s running in BASIC.
If you’re worried about competing with [Nick], don’t worry — the 2026 Retrocomputing contest has multiple categories. You still have a few weeks to do something retro-modern, restomod an old machine, or just do some old-school programming.
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