Welcome

This is your guide to the ACE — a whole 65C02 computer on one board, with its own keyboard built in, plus sound, joysticks and a disk. It boots in about five seconds, straight into BASIC, and it will still be doing exactly what you tell it in thirty years.

This is the whole computer. Every chip, the keyboard, and every socket you will ever plug anything into, on one board.

There is no operating system to log into and nothing to install. You switch it on, you get this:

-- 6502 BIOS v1.5 --
ENTER=BASIC  ESC=MONITOR

6502 BASIC V2.0
30718 BYTES FREE

OK

OK means the machine is waiting for you. Type this and press Enter:

PRINT "HELLO"

HELLO

OK

That's it. That's the whole idea. Everything else in this guide is a bigger version of that.

What you can do with it

• Write programs in BASIC — games, tunes, drawings, calculators. Type them in, run them, save them to the memory card.
• Make noise. Three voices of SID sound, the same chip that gave the Commodore 64 its voice.
• Draw on the screen. 40 columns by 24 rows, 16 colors, out to any VGA monitor.
• Plug in joysticks. Two Atari-style ports, which is all a good game needs.
• Go all the way down. Underneath BASIC there's a machine-code Monitor, and underneath that there's the bare 65C02. You can get to both.

Where to go next

If you…	Start here
have an ACE in front of you and nothing plugged in	Setting up
have it plugged in and want to see it boot	First power-on
are at the OK prompt right now	Your first ten minutes
don't have one yet	The emulator — it's a complete ACE, in your browser
want to know what's on the board	Your ACE

Everything in this guide works the same on real hardware and in the emulator. If you don't have a machine yet, open the emulator in another tab and follow along — nothing here needs anything you can't get for free.

About the family

The ACE is the finished article, but it isn't the only machine that runs this software. It's the last of five, and the other four are still around: the COB backplane, the DEV rig, the VCS console, and the KIM keypad. They're all open hardware, and they're all documented at the back of this guide if you'd like to build one.

The KIM is the interesting one, because it isn't really a separate machine any more — three small boards turn your ACE into a KIM-1. That's its own chapter.