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I think the Z80 was overall, due to its instruction set, the 8-bit CPU of choice unless the system builder needed to be cheap; and this makes sense given it was
by tenebrisalietum 6y ago
I think the Z80 was overall, due to its instruction set, the 8-bit CPU of choice unless the system builder needed to be cheap; and this makes sense given it was pretty much engineered to be a cheaper CPU than the Motorola 6501.
So it made sense that Commodore used a 6502 variant and I'm betting Nintendo chose a 6502 core for its NES to keep costs down. But all your old Japanese 8-bit arcade games of the 80s were Z80-based.
- philistine 6y agoThe Famicom used a 6502 clone from Ricoh in part because that’s the only thing they could find; every other chip manufacturer had too much backlog. They had already used the Ricoh chip in arcade boards, and just went with that one.
- fullstop 6y agoMy trusty graphing calculator, a TI-85, also was Z80-based.
- timbit42 6y agoWhile more computer and console systems were designed with a Z80, the 6502 computers and consoles vastly outsold the Z80 systems. The Z80 has more powerful instructions but they take longer to execute. The 6502 instructions are faster but you need more of them to do the same task. In the end, a 1 MHz 6502 was almost equivalent to a 3 MHz Z80. The Z80 was available up to 4 MHz but often ran at 3.58 MHz) and the 6502 was mostly 1 MHz (eg. Apple II, Commodore 64) but in a few systems (eg. BBC Micro, Commodore 128) it was 2 MHz.
- krallja 6y agoMotorola made 68xx, MOS Technologies made the short-lived 6501 which became the famous $25.00 6502 with some tweaks.