3 ms·

Really???? 6502s are still used (albeit as components)? People still do 6502 programming? If true I'm bloody gobsmacked.

raverbashing 4y ago
While it does exist, I think the answer is not really. Yes sometimes you don't need more than 8-bit but existing solutions from other vendors beat it with integrated RAM+Flash+IO etc
WorldMaker 4y ago
In college (more than a decade ago for me, but still in this millennium) our MOS 6502 hardware/assembly programming lab was called "Microcontroller Design". This was as opposed to the later lab class "Microcomputer Design" which used the more recent Motorola 68k. I suppose the chip that powered the original Macintoshes is slightly closer to today's idea of a microcomputer than the 6502 and its original "microcomputer revolution" Apple II/TI Home Computer/Commodore 64. One of the takeaways from those courses was that the "microcomputer" has moved on so much from what you can breadboard in a lab (the Motorola 68k was one of the last "microcomputer" chipsets that you could breadboard and even that was still a hardware reliability challenge), but MOS 6502 was cemented as a "forever" tool as a "microcontroller". You can still get ICs in bread board forms and build it next to classic TTL logic chips and test/prototype it at human scale clock cycles (things you can see/read in an oscilloscope in real time). You can merge into an SoC core and run it at modern processor clock cycles. There are so many wild uses for the MOS 6502 as a "microcontroller" on the periphery of computing. Between MOS' bankruptcy and the many licensees of the 6502 and the many people that cut their programming teeth in the "microcomputer revolution" of the Apple II et al, the 65xx family likely really is a vestigial "forever chip". As a programmer, and I've heard this sentiment from others too, I also think the 6502 was also the last "fun" assembly language to write directly without a higher level language, which adds to its legacy.
iasay 4y ago
Yes you can also still buy new 6502 and 6522 etc from WDC via digikey etc.
stockerta 4y ago
For a lot of things a 6502 or other 8bit cores are more than enough. Don't need to put a giant ARM or RISC-V into everything to drive a simple display.
- kragen 4y ago
  I'm just surprised to hear people use a 6502 rather than a Picoblaze or 8051 or something.
Gibbon1 4y ago
Those old cores are wildly efficient if you're just twiddling bits and shuffling data. And on modern processes you can run them at GHz clock speeds.
- zasdffaa 4y ago
  For the core alone, sure, but don't you have to run them off static ram or something (that is, not slow DRAM) to get anywhere near those speeds in practice?
  - Gibbon1 4y ago
    Yeah but code size is tiny, might be as small as a few hundred bytes.

raverbashing 4y ago

While it does exist, I think the answer is not really. Yes sometimes you don't need more than 8-bit but existing solutions from other vendors beat it with integrated RAM+Flash+IO etc

WorldMaker 4y ago

In college (more than a decade ago for me, but still in this millennium) our MOS 6502 hardware/assembly programming lab was called "Microcontroller Design". This was as opposed to the later lab class "Microcomputer Design" which used the more recent Motorola 68k. I suppose the chip that powered the original Macintoshes is slightly closer to today's idea of a microcomputer than the 6502 and its original "microcomputer revolution" Apple II/TI Home Computer/Commodore 64. One of the takeaways from those courses was that the "microcomputer" has moved on so much from what you can breadboard in a lab (the Motorola 68k was one of the last "microcomputer" chipsets that you could breadboard and even that was still a hardware reliability challenge), but MOS 6502 was cemented as a "forever" tool as a "microcontroller". You can still get ICs in bread board forms and build it next to classic TTL logic chips and test/prototype it at human scale clock cycles (things you can see/read in an oscilloscope in real time). You can merge into an SoC core and run it at modern processor clock cycles. There are so many wild uses for the MOS 6502 as a "microcontroller" on the periphery of computing. Between MOS' bankruptcy and the many licensees of the 6502 and the many people that cut their programming teeth in the "microcomputer revolution" of the Apple II et al, the 65xx family likely really is a vestigial "forever chip". As a programmer, and I've heard this sentiment from others too, I also think the 6502 was also the last "fun" assembly language to write directly without a higher level language, which adds to its legacy.

iasay 4y ago

Yes you can also still buy new 6502 and 6522 etc from WDC via digikey etc.

stockerta 4y ago

For a lot of things a 6502 or other 8bit cores are more than enough. Don't need to put a giant ARM or RISC-V into everything to drive a simple display.

kragen 4y ago
I'm just surprised to hear people use a 6502 rather than a Picoblaze or 8051 or something.

Gibbon1 4y ago

Those old cores are wildly efficient if you're just twiddling bits and shuffling data. And on modern processes you can run them at GHz clock speeds.

zasdffaa 4y ago
For the core alone, sure, but don't you have to run them off static ram or something (that is, not slow DRAM) to get anywhere near those speeds in practice?
- Gibbon1 4y ago
  Yeah but code size is tiny, might be as small as a few hundred bytes.