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the 6502 was not perfect but great for its time. If we were to design it today we could probably leave stuff out. Use multiple bytes per instruction to address
by throwaway14356 4y ago
the 6502 was not perfect but great for its time. If we were to design it today we could probably leave stuff out. Use multiple bytes per instruction to address the large memory, a few more accumulators and it wil do just fine.
Then we bake x of them onto a chip with y custom roms besides it and write everything from scratch.
Some operations will be more complicated than ever, some things will be slow but most complexity is gone.
As a bonus it will be absurdly cheap to make.
- dspillett 4y ago> it will be absurdly cheap to make Being cheap was one of the key reasons why the 6502, despite its faults†, was great for its time. It was much cheaper to buy than the similar competition (8600, 8080), IIRC by a factor of five in common cases. ---- [†] single true register‡ (plus a pair of more limited indexing registers, three if you count the stack pointer), and a few notable bugs like off-spec wrapping if indirect jump reads from a location at a page end (xxff) which I once banged my head against. [‡] mitigated a bit by rapid access to page 0
- throwaway14356 4y agoThe part where you wrote something and it would run on any c64 exactly the same way. A few hacks aside, you could get some work done and it was done! Today the update circus feels like jenga.