Is the 6502 still alive? Are people still using them? My question is from a hobby perspective. I am experimenting with little micro- and embedded systems and the 6502 looks like a good candidate to play with because of its simplicity.
S.
Stefan Arentz wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@keizer.soze.com:
Or a Silicon Labs (Cygnal) 8051 eval. kit because of its simplicity, on-chip JTAG debugging in C, and all-in-one packaging.
-- - Mark -> --
Not really - Mitsubushi's 6502 based micros are probably still around but if you'd probably be better off messing with PICs, which have an even simpler instruction set than the 6502..!
Which was the original target for one of the first small, independant "semi-Unix-like" operating systems: OS-9
-- Grant Edwards grante Yow! I'm GLAD I at remembered to XEROX all visi.com my UNDERSHIRTS!!
There's still a few newer products high volume products based on the core. Western Design Center owns some IP on the 6502 and sells it. I worked for a short time on a Seiko message watch, a few years back, based on the 6502 core.
Jon
Yes.
Probably.
Oh. Then probably not.
Hmmm. The last time I worked with this family was about 20 years ago. Personally I wouldn't go back because it requires too much infrastructure to get started. By the time you've added address decoding, non volatile and volatile memory, and peripherals, you've gotten yourself up to an outdated arhitecture with limited capabilities.
There's nothing simple about it.
If you want simple, get started with a single chip microcontroller solution. Any of the current crop of flash based microcontroller offerings (PIC, AVR, MSP430, Zilog Z8 and the like) will run rings around the 6502, and carries all the stuff I listed above all onboard.
I've done 6802, 6809, 68K, Z80, and 8051 based microprocessor systems. For embedded developement you couldn't drag me back screaming to that environment again.
And when you start looking at those, make sure you look at current parts. You'll find web sites will trend to older equipment. For example in the PIC world if you start Googling you'll see the 16F84 as the gold standard. It was: 8 years ago. Now there are a heaping helping of newer faster, better cheaper parts available.
Hope this helps.
BAJ (Trivial PIC Programmer Designer:
And bloody good it was too.
Ian
The 6502 is a capable core, but never really made it into the Single Chip FLASH Microcontroller sector.
SST did actually release data on a Flash 6502 uC probably
2 years ago now, but they pulled it in favour of the 89C51.If you want to experiment/learn, look for the FLASH uC with on-chip debug, and reasonably capable Analog operation, plus low cost eval/debug systems.
Good candidates here are : Silabs (ex Cygnal) - see
Most impressive in this lineup, is the $25 064 Kit, 2 x USB + 1MSPS 16 bit ADC + 64KF fast uC :
A couple of their smaller cores are available in DIP packages.
Less capable, but with devices in more hobbyist friendly packages ( and still with on Chip Debug ) are the eZ8 devices
-jg
Very much so.
A couple of years ago I made a 6502[1] based toy that was selling over 100,000 units per day.
Stay away from the 6502. Use a PIC.
Note 1: Sunplus makes a stripped down 6502 with instructions and registers deleted. Very cheap if you want 50,000 of them with your program in masked ROM.
Don't get me started. (Sniff)
-- Richard Pennington Email: rich@pennware.com http://www.pennware.com ftp://ftp.pennware.com
about a year ago I opened up a $20 modern electronic chess board (a board with lights on it that you can play chess against, something like this
Pretty much. I think it's more fun to work on lower volume, higher margin stuff. OTOH, I can't walk into Target and see something I worked on either...
--
Grant Edwards grante Yow! Hmmm... A hash-singer
at and a cross-eyed guy were
visi.com SLEEPING on a deserted
island, when...
A Gimix Ghost, 12 serial ports (7 users, 2 printers, 1 modem), 20M drive and 512K of RAM. We'd compile, edit print and send out stories on that machine. This was before the IBM PC! I still don't undertand why the used the terminal port DB25 for the Parallel printer and the modem port DB25 for the RS232 port. Couldn't they just follow the existing standard! ;-) And for those of you with no sense of humor there was no standard. But IBM did seem to setup their equipment different to the way everyone else, at the time, that I can remember.
-- Linux Home Automation Neil Cherry ncherry@comcast.net http://home.comcast.net/~ncherry/ (Text only) http://linuxha.sourceforge.net/ (SourceForge) http://hcs.sourceforge.net/ (HCS II)
It is being used in the new HP33S calculator released by HP this year but in general it has not been used much in recent years. A great little microprocessor, however.
Jerry
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6809 was the best 8-bit CPU ever made. As for OS-9, I vaguely remember a Byte column (1986?) where Jerry Pournelle said OS-9 compared to DOS like Robert de Niro compared to Sylvester Stallone. (Was Roman-Digit-Sylvester that bad?)
I take it /some/ instructions and registers are deleted, not /all/ registers and instructions are deleted.
How do you delete /any/ register from the 6502 architecture and have a processor left?
Do you know who makes the one HP are using ?
-jg
Found it here : [SPLB31A] 256K Rom, 4K RAM, LCD,
-jg
Real Men can program a 6502 without using the Y Register. :)
It sure would be nice if there was a hack that allowed us to program a HP33S calculator in machine language...
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