I'm looking for a stable, tested 6502 core
does one exist?
I'm looking for freebies or pay-to-gets
Rich
I'm looking for a stable, tested 6502 core
does one exist?
I'm looking for freebies or pay-to-gets
Rich
see previous post
The 6502 core there is not bad - it is cycle and operation accurate for most stuff -and it's free.
This unit for sure contains a 6502 hdl core: (by Jeri_Ellsworth)
Same girl, another product:
She proberbly have a 6502 core somewhere.
Here's another:
Try 6520 vhdl in google..
I have googled and found many broken, inaccurate cores.
RHi,
Both the T65 from Opencores and Free6502 from the Free-Ip Project (its been a while that the guy took it offline, but you can still get it from fpgaarcade) are stable and rather small in terms of logic resources (30% of xc3s200). We have used them in a good five projects. Each one has their own pros and cons. The T65 has a well defined synchronous interface but tries to mimic the real 6502, signals are inverted and so on. The free6502 on the other hand, has a good interface too but lacks a ready input signal. For people that wants to run it at maximum speed (around 40 MHZ, 10 mips), its tricky to make it go into wait states (to handle slower peripherals like an RTL8019AS chip), while the T65 has that mechanism and will allow itself to be idle...
In all, both are very usable and well-defined soft processors suitable for FPGA implementation.
Jacques
snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote:
Daniel Wallner's 6502 core at opencores.org
I concur with your findings.
As my first boss used to say, starting projects is easy - finishing them is not.
If you have a project like building a vintage car or aeroplane, other people are only impressed when you can turn the key and take off. Or if they can see you making good progress in the project. If it is started briskly then left for ages, then chances are you got stuck and don't have the skills to complete it.
Likewise with reproductions of old CPU cores. We can all start one, but until it is fully working it is nothing to brag about.
In contrast, Daniel does seem to see the job through. So much so that I notice places that used to sell Z80 and 6502 cores as IP no longer bother.
I would like to use his CPU designs in my own projects, but mine now use more of my FPGA than his CPU designs do. So for now I just stick with external (and still cheap and readily available) CPU chips.
FYI - the T65 from opencores has known bugs. For example ADC (),Y is broken. You would be better off getting the T65 from fpgaarcade
I'm pretty sure that the free6502 (now only available at
Another possibility is the core at
The main problem is that none of these cores include documentation or verification suites. I would plan on being able to switch different cores in and out if you run into problems. Kind of a pain since they are all a little different, but might save pain during development.
Regards, Keith
It might be a fun project to run two cores in lock step running the same program and see how far they get before they get a different result.
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I maintain the cores on fpgaarcade. That trick is how I found most of the problems in the T80 core, and is the reason it is more accurate than the T65 core which I have never got around to doing the same thing. I think there are some pictures on the pacman page on the website showing the real Z80 being run alongside.
When running the pacman code, the real Z80 and the T80 core stay in lock-step indefinately, which I am quite happy with.
/MikeJ
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