4 ms·
The 65816 is a fascinating chip, even though it's a dead end in the evolution of home computing. It falls in a category with the Z8000 and maybe even the 80286
by ataylor284_ 4y ago
The 65816 is a fascinating chip, even though it's a dead end in the evolution of home computing. It falls in a category with the Z8000 and maybe even the 80286: backwards compatible with their predecessors, but extending them in odd, idiosyncratic ways. Processors evolved and mostly discarded the vestigial weirdness of the original 8-bits, but its a special kind of fun to revisit assembly language programming in that style with some of the oppressive constraints (address space, addressing modes, minimal registers) lifted.
- eru 4y agoThe original Game Boy had some very interesting capabilities as well. In some aspects it outclasses the NES, in some others it lags behind. (I specifically mean that the NES only had sprites and a single background layer. The Game Boy had an additional 'window' layer for drawing eg status bars, but also capable of doing funky things in eg boss battles. It also got some capabilities built-in that the NES needed extra chips on the cartridge for.) Looking at what the Game Boy could do, you get the sense that they carefully optimized for the exact specialised capabilities they needed for games at minimal transistor-count cost. Being such a late 8-bit system helped a lot with that.