Reference cards
Fourteen sheets, sized for letter paper, meant to be printed and kept next to the keyboard. Every one of them condenses a chapter — nothing is on a card that is not also somewhere in this guide, so a card is a shortcut, never the only copy.
They open as plain pages outside the guide. Use your browser's back button to come back.
How to print one
Open the card, print, and set:
- Paper: Letter
- Scale: 100% — not "fit to page", which will shrink the margins away
- Margins: None
- Background graphics: On — the black bars are part of the design
Every card says the same thing in a strip along the top, which does not print. The fonts are in the page, so a card printed from a laptop with no internet looks the same as one printed online.
The machine
| Card | What it covers | The chapter it condenses |
|---|---|---|
| 📄 6502-ACE | The whole machine on two pages: what is on the board, the memory map, the first things to type, and enough BASIC and Monitor to get going. The one that ships with the computer | Your ACE |
| 📄 Memory Map | All 64 KB, then RAM and ROM in detail, then every I/O register on the board | The memory map |
| 📄 Connectors | Every socket and header, pin by pin, off the schematic | Connectors |
| 📄 Keyboard Layout | The 67 keys as they sit, and the ones that do something out of the ordinary | The keyboard |
| 📄 Keyboard Matrix | The 8 × 8 grid behind those keys, with the code each one sends | The keyboard matrix |
The software
| Card | What it covers | The chapter it condenses |
|---|---|---|
| 📄 BASIC Reference | Every keyword with its syntax, the operator table, every error message, and the three traps that catch everyone | Every keyword |
| 📄 Monitor Reference | All seventeen commands, the register display, and G versus J | The Monitor |
| 📄 Kernal Jump Table | All 53 published entry points with their registers, grouped by job | The Kernal |
| 📄 Character Set | All 256 glyphs drawn from the ROM's own bytes, with names, and what PRINT can actually reach | The character set |
| 📄 F18A Registers | Every enhanced register on the video card, bit by bit, plus the status registers and the attribute bytes | Every register |
That last one is the sheet to have printed rather than open in a tab: F18A mode runs on real hardware only, so the machine you are testing it on is not the machine you would be reading it on.
The KIM add-on
| Card | What it covers | The chapter it condenses |
|---|---|---|
| 📄 6502-KIM | The three boards, what they overlay, the pad, and the serial monitor | The KIM keypad |
| 📄 Keypad Mapping | All twenty-four keycodes and what the LCD shows for each | The keypad map |
Two more sheets have the LED demos laid out to key in, byte by byte: 📄 Binary counter and 📄 KITT scanner.
The rest of the family
Written for someone building one, not using one.
| Card | Machine |
|---|---|
| 📄 6502-COB | The modular original — a passive backplane and a stack of cards. COB |
| 📄 6502-DEV | The development rig — an emulated CPU you can single-step. DEV |
| 📄 6502-VCS | The console — cartridges and joysticks. VCS |
Older BIOS versions
The BASIC and Monitor cards for v1.0 through v1.4 are kept under /cards/archive/. They describe machines whose ROMs are no longer current and are there for anyone running one, not as a second opinion about this one.
Other reference pages
Not cards, but the same job:
- The character set — all 256 glyphs, and the boundary of what
PRINTwill pass - Connectors — every pinout
- The keyboard matrix — the 8 × 8 grid
- The keypad map — the KIM add-on's keycodes
- Glossary — the words this guide uses, and what they mean here
- Every keyword and every error message — the BASIC reference in full
- The memory map and The Kernal — the programmer's reference in full