"Hackerboxes" is a monthly subscription box. Each month a new box is
delivered with electronic parts with some kind of theme. This month's theme
was "MEGA Retro."

Inside the box were an MOS 6502, a Z80, an Arduino Mega, and two unassembled Arduino Mega shields -- one for the 6502 and one for the Z80. Assembly of the shields required soldering of about 10 SMD components total (resistors and capacitors -- no chips), soldering of the 40-pin sockets for the chips, and
the 6502 shield required shorting one of two connections depending on whether the chip installed was an MOS 6502 or a Western Digital W65C02.

Once assembled, the Arduino can drive the pins of the microcontroller and
bring it to life with no other hardware needed (except a modern computer for programming the Arduino). All in all, really cool, I think!

The boxes change every month and they do produce a few extras, but they are more expensive to buy outside of the subscription and once stock of a particular box is gone, it's gone. However, the two shields do have "Designed by www.8bitforce.com" printed on them, so it may be possible to get the PCBs from there(?) and source the rest of the parts from an electronics supplier
of choice. As mentioned above, the 6502 shield is capable of using the
original MOS 6502 (which may be a little hard to find) or its modern counterpart from WDC.

I haven't been able to do much with them yet because I'm busy working on my PDP-8 FPGA project, but they do look like lots of fun.

Jeff.

"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." -- H. L. Mencken, who indeed was a racist thereby proving himself right.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A46 2020/08/26 (Raspberry Pi/32)
* Origin: Cold War Computing BBS (21:1/180)