3 ms·
Sounds nice, but the 6502 is certainly real, available hardware that you can buy and set up on a breadboard. There are tutorials on youtube for it as well, suc
by musicale 2y ago
Sounds nice, but the 6502 is certainly real, available hardware that you can buy and set up on a breadboard.
There are tutorials on youtube for it as well, such as Ben Eater's tutorial.
- brucehoult 2y agoYes I'm well aware. I have a 65C02 on a breadboard. I have a 6809 on a breadboard. I've seen all Ben's videos. The *only* advantage the 6502 has is the exposed and non-multiplexed address and data busses, which you can single-step and examine with an Arduino or something. The whole setup is going to cost you the thick end of $100. But you can do that just as easily in an emulator. And meanwhile with RISC-V you can get an ESP32-C3 board with 400k RAM for a dollar or two, or the 1 GHz 64 MB RAM 64 bit Linux Milk-V Duo for $5. And if you wish, run exactly the same programs on a $2500 64 core 128 GB RAM Pioneer. And bunches of $10, $30, $70, $100, $200 boards (and now $400 laptops) in between. Only ARM gives you similar breadth, but the instruction sets of a Cortex-M0 and M4 Mac are so different they might as well be from different companies.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- tcbawo 2y agoHaving a large body of old software and games, written for various random platforms across 20+ years is also a killer feature.
- renewedrebecca 2y agoAnd you'd have to spend a ton of time porting to each target system. OTOH, the Z80 is better for this, because you can at least get CP/M up and running with a minimum of trouble.
- musicale 2y agoWith an 8088 you could port DOS (which resembles CP/M-86) though games would require more memory and a video chip. But we've kind of left true 8-bit territory at this point.