newbie building a scratch-built computer (River)

Hi, I would have thought "scratch-built" implied designing and building your own home brewed system. Building a kit like the Micro-KIM is not a scratch build exercise. All it will do is give you more practise in soldering. If the whole purpose of this exercise is to have an old 8-bit system so you can program in hex and/or assembler, then you can download an emulator and play around with it from there. If you mainly want to run things off the various serial and parallel ports then something like the Micro-KIM would be useful. If you want to do the whole lot yourself, then the best way to get "dirty" is to design your own system, build it yourself (either via wire-wrap or soldering) and develop your own small debug/monitor program. There's plenty of information on the Internet to find some small designs that you can use, and also hints and ideas on debug/monitor code. I design and build my own systems - not for anything really purposeful, but mainly for fun. I like to see how many different processor systems I can build. I also like expanding on old systems, such as the AIM65 or wire-wrap extra memory/IO boards for Multibus-I, etc. The easiest oldish 8bit processors to use for a homebrew system would be the 6502, 6802, Z80 and 8085. When you've built one... say a 6502... then the next fun thing is to build (say) and 8085 system, with similar functionality and using the Intel family peripheral chips. Then you can get onto the less common processors like the 2650, 9980... or even the SC/MP. In any event, whatever path you take, have fun, learn and enjoy yourself. Seeyuzz River