3 ms·
You might have wound up with something a lot like the Apple II GS. (At least one Atari engineer I know worked on the IIGS. Personally I thought it was crazy to
by kabdib 3y ago
You might have wound up with something a lot like the Apple II GS.
(At least one Atari engineer I know worked on the IIGS. Personally I thought it was crazy to work on 16-bit machines when 32-bit architectures like the 68000 were just coming into the marketplace).
- retrocryptid 3y agoYes and no. The 6502 die size was tiny compared to most 16 bit and all 32 bit cpus. It was ALWAYS going to be cheaper. For quite some time (maybe even still) WDC had a great business selling 6502 family cores matched with semi-custom IO on the same die as device controllers. But the IIgs was a crazy machine. My mom brought one home for a couple months when the school district she worked at adopted them. It was surprisingly usable, though the screen resolution was a bit low.
- nickt 3y agoI dunno. The 6502 looks pretty large with this version. https://monster6502.com/ https://monster6502.com/
- retrocryptid 3y agoI'm sure there's a die-shrink coming soon
- kabdib 3y agoFun fact: The Macintosh II (68020) had two 6502 processors on its motherboard, somewhere in the I/O system. Originally intended to do some kind of I/O acceleration, they were never used by MacOS. I heard they just ran Mandlebrot-generation test code.