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Curious, is there a reason to think the 65816 wasn’t just a good CPU? From a supplier Nintendo had a good working relationship with? I mean, we'll never know f
by Wowfunhappy 5y ago
Curious, is there a reason to think the 65816 wasn’t just a good CPU? From a supplier Nintendo had a good working relationship with?
I mean, we'll never know for sure, but what was the cpu landscape like? Were the other options clearly better?
- christkv 5y agoThe Motorola 68000 is the only other one I can think off.
- phire 5y agoThis has always been my view; It's the only CPU I know about that met the requirements. Other 16bit consoles used an off-the-shelf 68000, combined with custom support chips. Nintendo made their own custom cpu silicon, an off-the-shelf soft-cpu and custom support logic for bus control and DMAs. And there simply weren't that many 16bit soft-cpus available for Nintendo to license. You couldn't license the 68000 HDL, nor the 8086 HDL.
- djmips 5y ago"From a supplier Nintendo had a good working relationship with?" What do you mean by that? Nintendo did not have a working relationship with the supplier of the 65816 prior to development of the SNES.
- RetroSpark 5y agoPresumably this refers to Ricoh, who produced the CPUs and PPUs for both the NES and Super NES.