The 6502 CPU Powered a Whole Generation!

What products do make those billions of 6502 a quarter in the modern age?

@@danielmantione I suppose all those small ICs and especially sensors which you find in almost each technical product and which do not require an ARM oder other 32 bit CPU. Even recently designed products often contain either a 6502 or 8051 CPU. And there are for example more than hundred of those sensors in each modern car.

I pulled out my TG-16 a few weeks ago and it doesn't boot. I expect it needs to be re-capped. 😥 Still... I loved that machine and with full stereo sound and 64-bit graphics I could not understand why people owned Nintendos. LoL.

​@@danielmantionewashing machines dryers basically all over..I love seeing them pop up an like said I'm the video toys... there all over

​@@danielmantioneThere are calculators that run under a variant of the 6502 many simple devices have a 6502 NES clone consoles have a 6502 core chip

the 8-bit guys is correct about how cpu speed does not compare well against different cpu's because amd's cpu's where slower then the pentium 4's but could seriously match or even outperform faster pentium4's so the 6502 is not the only cpu that proves this issue it works even with modern computers cpu's

I wouldn't be so sure, machines are getting ridiculously complex, and I doubt you're going to be implementing RDNA GPUs with unified memory in an FPGA anytime soon. Let alone accurately. 😅

@@SaraMorgan-ym6ueRight, however on "modern" hardware (so even 20 years ago) the clockspeed was just a tiny bit of the puzzle. The size and usage of the cache was in most cases much more important. CPUs have reached a complexity level that makes it almost impossible to predict the performance ahead of time. They have dynamic pipeline optimisation stuff going on that's just wild. In the good old day you just pick up an instruction set sheet, look up the clock cycles of each instruction, add them up and you get a fairly good estimate how long your code would take to run. This isn't the case anymore.

@@SK83RJOSH I read your comment but Im not sure what it has to do with the 6502?

@@Bunny99s well give it credit for surviving this long since no other cpu's have lasted as long as the 65c02 and 65c816 they are in it for the long haul plain and simple (for being manufactured this long) I mean lasting this long for manufacturing life all other cpu's are discontinued

The Z80 is very cool and fun to program. Thanks for sharing! And big props to your grandfather and Zilog.

Hell yeah, would that make you the first Game Boy?

The TRS-80 Model I was my first home computer, and the first platform I learned assembly language on. The Z-80 will always have a special place of honor in my vintage-computing collection. 🙂

The Z80 was in everything, there was nothing like it. Still not fully understood today completely. Even the military used it everywhere.

interesting my grandpa on my dad's side couldn't even find the on button on a pc and refused to use them .my grandpa on my moms side knew a lot about analogue electronics like crt tv's and vcr's but when it came to computers i didn't have one until 2008 and kept getting malware .

3:40 Nice CGI

You got some solid points, but The 8-Bit Guy already made several videos of consoles and computers that were powered by the 6502 and he did go into fair details of the chip scattered across them. I hope David covers the Z80. I own a 20mhz variant and I would love to learn more about it.

6809E here lol

@@elijahvincent985My z180 powered SC126 also would say "yes" to a video about the z80 and its descendants.

@@Mmacrossfirekenai And the 6809 family deserves a lot of love, too. OS-9 for the win!

@davidryle Do you remember a guy named Hal Chamberlin? He wrote a killer book called Musical Applications of Microprocessors. It was my “Bible” in 1980.

@MultiPetercool I still have my copy of that book. An amazing resource the time, and still full of good info.

@@GodmanchesterGoblin I met Synth Legend Roger Powell about that time. He was working with an Apple 2 with a Mountain Hardware 16 channel A/D-D/A converter board in it. He used to to handle control voltages and triggers for his Moog and Serge modules. Cool stuff! I think he used it on his second solo album Air Pocket.

That is super cool! I've always wanted to get one of PAiA's theremin kits!

Larry Fast rocked.

Note: As I recall, Apple //e used a 65c02, a CMOS version of the processor.

Wow! Fascinating!

Yes, please. It felt very edited down! I'd love to see more.

+1

Agreed.

Yes, PLEASE!

Seconded

I have not done this yet. What have I not passed?

I skipped that and wrote an 8086 emulator for MIPS and ARM 25 years ago so you could run PC programs on those processors for Windows CE. Found an undocumented feature of the 8086 on the way that MS-DOS was dependent on too.

@@nicholaslarson3778 Once you finish the emulator a cutscene plays while you're sleeping.

I skipped both and touched a boob

Writing the correct Overflow handling in a 6502 emulator is a rite of passage.

Those simplifications were super important though: 6800 was eye-meltingly expensive at the time and the 6502 was cheap enough to practically sell by the barrel!

@@talideoni think it was $25 vs $125. I have the feeling that production cost was not the only reason why the motorola was so expensive. Misunderstanding the market costed motorola to lose the industry

Fun fact:(s) Similar to the 6800, the Data General Nova (1969) had two accumulators and two index registers and a zero page! But historians and Chuck Peddle himself (who worked on both the 6800 and 6502) said the 6800 was inspired by the PDP-11 although from a modern perspective the PDP-11 is a lot closer to the 68000. However when you are coding the Motorola processors (6800, 6809 or 68000) vs the MOS Technology 6502 it is apparent that the C style structs are prefered by the addressing mode design and that does have PDP-11 roots. On the 6502 you end up wanting structure of arrays.

Yep. In fact Motorola sued them because of the extreme similarities.

Yeah, as an electrical engineering student, I cut my teeth on assembly on the 6800. I guess the college must have gotten a deal going with Motorola so they could “hook” us early. We soon moved to the TI TMS9900. And holy cow that thing was 16 bit! Wow. …lol

I appreciate these guys’ work too. But if you want real, eternal fulfilment I highly recommend you turn to the Lord Jesus. Read one of the Gospels today, perhaps. God bless. 🙏

6502 designs were often UMA like current consoles.

I wish someone could create a 6502 religion... Of course it kinda already exists, but someone needs to make it official.

The Gameboy ran a Z80 variant so I wonder why Nintendo made the switch there.

@@Alfred-Neuman Bender did! (Bender was powered by the 6502): Bender founded Robotology

It was just as easy to implement memory mapped graphics in Z80 machines. All clones of Sinclair Spectrum implemented it with a handful of ttl logic chips. Overall the complexity and performance were very similar.

Yes David you don't need to apologize at the end, it wasn't too long and many of us would be happy too watch a "Part Two" video if you make one.

I heard rumors that some Chryslers had RCA 1802s under the hood for fuel management.

Ditto, I drive an '84 F150, also with the same 8061 EEC-IV feedback carb (300 I6). They only offered feedback carbs for 3 years (300 and 351 84-86, 302 84-85). A bit of a weird technology, but for an eccentric like me, it fits!

You wouldn't be wrong... GM actually commissioned a 6800 variant for their earliest engine control modules in the early '80s! (the 6502 began as a low-cost version of the 6800 after all)

6502 were used for ICBMs (Rocketdyne) as well as the spaceshuttles.

There are a lot of cars using 8051-compatible processors for various tasks. In recent times, most of those have moved to ARM, but, possibly some simple tasks like seat adjustment might be done with a specialized motor controller running 8051 code.

This statement is a bit deceptive. The HuC6280 had an instruction set extension for copying memory to / from its video controller, which was far faster than doing it in software with the regular LDA/STA instructions.

@@glenndoiron9317 Deceptive is a bit deceptive. I’m just being concise in the internet. So sue me.

@@grafxgearexpect a summons in the mail.

That video co-processor did a lot of the heavy lifting on the PC Engine, much like most consoles of the time. The same even went for the C64. Things such as scrolling the screen, throwing sprites around the screen and collision detection, all of which could be very CPU intensive, were handled by these chips allowing the CPU to handle other things. That's why if you look at C64 versions of games vs. a Spectrum or an Amstrad version, no matter the quality of the gameplay itself(I can tell you from experience some Spectrum versions play better than their C64 versions), the C64 would typically have a smoother framerate and better scrolling. The only games I can think of where that isn't true is games that use 3D rendering.

I don't think the OP was deceptive, but I always considered the TG16's name to be deceptive. :)

You coded the C64's 6502?

@@Okurka.oh here we go... Well, I've coded several machines over my 40 year career. I guess I could get into the minutia of every specific variant, but I was being general. But I guess I should be more pedantic, considering the video and likely audience. 🙄

Pretty sure it used a DSP or something to decode MP3.

no 8 bit of the era can decode mp3. do not tell us such kind of bullshits

There might be a Z80 core in some mp3 players for controlling them, but no way that thing does the mp3 decoding. That is done in a hardware decoder on the same chip.

​@@mrnmrn1​As i said. no 8 bit processor has enough power to sw-decode a mp3 stream.

@@gasparinizuzzurro6306 And that's exactly what I said, too...

UFO Phil heard it from George noory

Fun research: look up robert lazar's criminal history.

​@@Peter_S_ propaganda?

@@Nobbie248 No, court and police record. Public records. He's not a nice person and he's a typical con.

And a 68030 and AOL took down the aliens. Just watch Independence Day

I grew up with many of the systems it was in. C64, NES, Apple II, etc. It was awesome.

First time I got to use a PC in real life was a OSI C1p and 41P at 12 years old in the late seventies. I still remember the first words OSI 6502 BASIC VERSION 3.2 (c) MS etc. The MS part doomed me for life lol

@@axle.student Was probably pretty similar to the commodore basic too, as both were made by MS.

@@maxxdahl6062 Similar. The Commodore also had a more advanced color display as well as the advanced sound mapping, but even the base code had subtle differences. Apple II, Amstrad etc had subtle differences. There is a page somewhere in wiki that has a list of the different 6502 BASIC variants. From the OSI BASIC start I can code in any form OF BASIC ever created. I Often use FreeBASIC beside C and Python.

Once you realise all the zero page instructions are there to provide loads of “registers” that can be used in lots of flexible ways, the 6502 is actually replete with registers ;)

And a little known thing called the Amiga.

But it's not 8 bit!

And the TI-89/92 series of graphing calculator, which are still in production in some form to this day.

@@-taz- There was the 68008 variant with an 8 bit data bus, but otherwise fully compatible.

And Atari ST

The interview with Bill didn't go so well. He goes off on a lot of tangents, and there wasn't a lot of great material to share.

@@The8BitGuy Appreciate the honest reply. It's a shame the video didn't go well. Best of luck to Bill anyway. He's a piece of history.

FR

I, too, truly appreciate the honesty. Mensch is obviously an architecture legend, but that doesn’t automatically translate into eloquence.

Tangents are fun too, sometimes!

and the 8_bit guy was born that's why 1975 was a great year indeed

The big idea behind ARM was to exploit the memory bandwidth to the max. When they evaluated all the current 16 bits CPUS (80285, 16032, 68000, 65816) they were appalled by their inefficient use of the memory bandwidth.

As did the 6502, with the rising / falling edge CLK logic almost doubling memory bandwidth (as i believe a video somewhere on KZhead mentions). Acorn's MEMC 1 / 1A may have been more efficient, with a near single clock cycle memory accesses possible, when using the read / store multiple instructions (to push / pull fifteen of the twenty seven, 32 bit registers, as a block, taking 18 clk cycles = 3.33 bytes per 8MHz clock tick, rather than the standard 2 clk ticks per single ARM read / store op = 2 bytes per clock tick, let alone the 4 clk ticks needed on the like of a 68000 to read a 32bit word = one bytes per tick. Memory access was 2 to 3.33 times faster on an Acorn Archimedes, at the same clock speed, than a 68000 based Amiga, ST, Mac, Sun One, ..., the Archimedes were also marginally faster clocked than the PAL variants of the above), making for some quick stack accessing wizardry on a branch or return, along with some weird, 7-bit, reverse page logic, initially eliminating the need for much of the slow blocking logic found in the CISC toys. Though only 22 bits (4 MB) of the address bus went anywhere (without a multi MEMC and motherboard fudge), and the VLSI logic / DRAM couldn't be clocked above 8MHz, for the first six years of ARM chippery. Till the ARM 610 appeared, you couldn't source a true 32bit ARM SoC.

@@galier2I remember reading somewhere around the time ARM 1 came out, that they tested the other CPUs using the TUBE on the BBC micro - because that allowed them to separate specific aspects of performance which exposed the issues. I held on to that idea that the BBC micro has that important role in the dev of ARM which is now in billions of devices - but I heard something more recently that cast doubt on that. I’d love to have confirmation either way :)

@@sputukgmail The BBC micro was developed by Acorn the same people who created the ARM cpu. (ARM == Acorn Risc Machine). And yes they used BBC Micros to help develop the first ARM CPU and the software for it.

@@andrewgrant788 yes, I’m aware of of the origins of ARM - used one of the first Archimedes, followed the dev very closely- but it’s the conflicting stories of how important using the Tube with second processors to inform the team realising how to focus on Arm being the right path that I am hoping someone can clarify. As I say, I recall an article/interview were someone said how important it was, but I also watched a documentary about the dev of Arm that suggested they had already decided RISC was the way to go before they got the other processors to experiment with and test using the Tube.

so sometime in your life you have interacted with a 6502 processor you know🤣🤣

I think that it is weird that the cartridge also ran at that clock. Hudson added an instruction to burst copy data to VRAM ( and RAM). So level loading was fast and you can spend the splash screen on decompression. Or stream a level. Only problem: all operands are immediate. So jump indirect or self modify code.

Did it really run at 7.18 MHz, or did the system insert waitstates? The NES and SNES have a system clock at 21.47{72} MHz (6 times the NTSC color subcarrier frequency), but that doesn't mean that anything else in the system runs that fast. The graphics chips were the fastest at 5.3693{18} MHz. Also, the SEGA Genesis had a system clock of 53.693{18} MHz (15 x color subcarrier), with various dividers for the components. This is where MIPS benchmarks become more useful...

@@shinyhappyrem8728 Fanboys assured me that it does run at this clock. Remember: that was in 1987. Even the first draft/prototype of any circuit made in a NEC fab would run at that clock.

A lot of toys use it. For example Tamagotchis kzhead.info/sun/lpiJm8eSipV4iXA/bejne.html

Variants of the 6502 are still in use, one of the most versatile CPUs ever designed.

Fun fact, the code for the Furby is available and is fun to look through if you know 6502 :)

Well I'm a big 6502 fan but the world is probably powered by ARM. Which is not bad because at the end of the day ARM was designed by Acorn which previously used a 6502 but then needed something better which still doesn't use much power, and the result was ARM. There is an excellent video by the channel www.youtube.com/@LowSpecGamer about the history of ARM; he also has very good videos on the history of the 6502 and the Z80.

They didn't want to make a copy, they wanted to make a much cheaper CPU! :)

Wikipedia does mention the leak, and the factory becoming an EPA Superfund site just as Commodore was in the process of taking over. Sounds like MOS hadn't informed the new owners and left them holding the bag. It doesn't say what happened after that; if I were in Jack Tramiel's shoes, I'd have sued the former owners into the middle ages!

That's life in the 70's! I grew up where a chrome plant dumped their plating chemicals into the town aquifer to help boost testicular cancer rates. Probably why the EPA came about in the 70's, too.

I heard that when Commodore refused to manufacture the Clipper Chip(NSA spy chip for cellphones) they sent the EPA to close MOS technologies for "Environmental concerns". This was in late '93. Commodore didn't kill itself...

Did they ever want to dispose of TCE properly, or just pay the shareholders and then go out of business? I don’t understand why everyone wants humans in a manufacturing or chemical plant. I also kinda hate the ISS.

I was at one fab in the 1970s. They used a gas to dope the wafers. They had the option of borane or arsine. In the gas cylinder room the arsine cylinders were untouched and covered with dust. "There is no way we are going to risk using that stuff".

Anything to show off the game and computer he sells.

Mine still works, the two pages of memory space for mapping external peripherals is brilliant.

1 comment. It's 6502, not 5602.

One comment. He answered the interview problem in another comment, but I won't say which comment.

One little but not insignificant mistake in the video is that the WDC 65C816 would be from 1985, but it actually is from 1983 - which means a backwards compatible 16 bit successor to the C64 could have been done early enough to become the ancestor of our current PCs instead of the IBM PC, with Commodore still ruling the world now.

@@NuntiusLegis The design of the WDC65C816 started in 1983, Atari and Apple received prototype samples in the second half of 1984 and the official release of the CPU was early 1985.

@@Okurka. Ok, thanks, German Wikipedia didn't tell me that. But perhaps 1984 or 1985 would have been early enough as well.

I bet you loved the VIC-II and SID more.

Yes, I liked them so much I licked their shells.@@Okurka.

Still I wonder what would have happened if Commodore had released a successor to the C64 based on the 65c816 in 1985...

I mainly think of it from the TRS-80, disk drives, Sega Master System, and Sega Genesis. Some arcade games, too, I think, but I don't know off hand.

Still used on TI-84 graphing calculators which are still in current production. Actually, was used for most TI graphing calculators before the TI92 (and 89 series) moved to the 68K.

@@ratdude747 Like half of the Jeopardy questions, I'm sure I *used* to know that!

I love the whole structure of the Z80, and it was indeed used by lots of older arcade machines, also don't forget the 9 million MSX home computers.

@@ZenithMusicNet The MSX was sold worldwide (but not in England or the United States). That's why many people today don't know it. They don't know the rest of the world.

Heck I used the 8051 in a few embedded projects at work just several years ago. They are extremely versatile…

I agree - I hope there's a longer unedited version to share at some point.

​@@EddieSheffieldI read elsewhere here that the full interview didn't exactly... go so well. Bill went on a lot of tangents, apparently, as an example.

If anything, it felt "akward"

You're right. Rubik's cube was more a 1978/1979 big thing. I remember when I was in 8th class in middle school when I was summond to the school director, wondering what "crime" I had committed, to just having the director asking me to solve his cube.

@@galier2 I remember 1980 because it was my first year at highschool and couldn't wait to get my hands on one. There may be a Hungarian or two here in their late 50s who got one before the rest of us.

Designed in 1974, licensed for sale in the UK in 1978 and worldwide in 1980 (according Wikipedia). Bought my first cube in October 1980.

@@andrewdunbar828same here - 1st year at the comprehensive school and …lets just say, someone was selling legit cubes cheap somehow. I was too naive to realise why they were cheap at the time and only twigged months later, that not everyone pays for things when they walk out of a store!

kzhead.info/sun/f9aJqLFlqIuEh4E/bejne.html

Jeffrey Dahmer was also cute as a baby.

YES! Optimization was king back then, to the point it was more an "artform" than a skill set. And there were some damn fine "artists" back then

I agree, but that doesn’t mean it can’t still be fun. I personally don’t do a lot of actual optimization, I mostly try to make code that doesn’t run poorly and it’s pretty fun. This makes me want to do a homebrew project for an older cpu at some point through.

@@colleagueriley860: I work with 100s of people now. And most of them think optimization is a thing you get from adding more power to the machine. You hear them bitch and moan about power of hardware or engines in interviews with press.. it's depressing... And that's before we get to the simple fact the "higher ups" dont care and dont want you spending time/money on making it go fast.. just ship it out...

If people truly optimised code today it would be something else. Modern CPUs are so under utilised it's crazy

well, optimization back then was absolutely neccessary, because of the slow cpus, small mem etc. so there was no other way. you HAD to do it and that's why a lot of ppl became very good at it, it wasn't because it's "fun".

I count 13 address bits, A0 through A12. 😕

The 6507 CPU in the Atari 2600 can address 8KiB of memory space, 4KiB is devoted to the cartridge ROM and 4KiB is devoted to RAM, I/O, timer video and audio registers inside the RIOT and TIA chips.

I came to say something similar. BrainSlugs83 is close, but NerdlyPleasures has it right. I'm currently working on my first Atari 2600 game. The 6507 also still has internal vectors for interrupts that have been moved to fit into the modified address space, even though it no longer has the external pins that trigger those interrupts.

@@NerdlyPleasures This is correct. A12 is mapped to the cartridge ROM chip select.

Nice being an asshole. It's not what you say, it's how you say it.

@@mrb5217 Oh, the irony!

@@Okurka. It's not irony; it's just paying back your rudeness in kind.

@@stevethepocket What rudeness?

@@Okurka.The part where you were rude

What is a toothbrush using a 6502 for? Am legitimately curious what computation is necessary for say a timer function!

​@@WomblingFreely battery controller is my guess

The Z80 powered the poor part of that generation.

@@Okurka. Poor? Not at all. It was used in many business machines. It was the basis of the MSX computer standard. It was also widely used in games consoles. It had a rich instruction set, including 16-bit instructions.

But the BBC Micro had a 6502 and that fact eventually led to the creation of ARM in the further history of the Acorn company, so I think the impact of the 6502 even in the UK is probably higher at least from today's standpoint. By "powering a generation" in the 80 of course you are correct, that probably goes to the Z80 for Sinclair's computers being cheap.

@@mudi2000a The BBC Micro was expensive. That’s why the cheaper ZX Spectrum was so popular. I’m not saying that the 6502 wasn’t hugely popular, just that the Z80 was too, and it was also very successful so that the suggestion that the 6502 powered a generation of computers was wrong. It was a mixed market, and remained like that for a long time.

@@sjzara yes I didn’t deny that but at the end of the day the ARM processor was developed by the people that created the BBC Micro.

It is true. Everyone has their preference. If someone insults you because of this comment, they are wrong.

Exactly! Z80 is much more convenient to use than 6502.

Have you heard that Z80 will be discontinued in a few weeks. Sad really.

@@jbponzi1 Yes, it's sad for me, too, especially as I am an old and sentimental guy. But, on the bright side, the Z180 still lives; I wrote a lot of code for the Z180. And also the eZ80 - already over 20 years since introduced; seems like yesterday. Life is so short and CPUs come and go! 🙂

@@jbponzi1No, I have not heard that! That's terrible!

So what

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LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, WE GOT EM

I first remember it from 1981.

Gates is wanted in India for maiming millions with defective vaccines. He’s also releasing GMO mosquitoes to inject people against their will.