Slashdot Mirror

Western Design Center still makes quite a bit of money selling those 65c02s and 65c816s. :P

the CMOS version of the 6502, the 65C02 and the static core version (clock can be slowed down or stopped without data loss) are still made and still used for embedded applications. We're talking annual volume in the hundreds of millions of units!
http://www.westerndesigncenter.com/wdc/

There is nothing to preserve, the 6502 is still being manufactured, available in silicon and cores (both hard and soft).

http://www.westerndesigncenter.com/wdc/

Not sure why the original poster claims that the 6502 core design was lost in time. WDC (Western Design Center http://www.westerndesigncenter.com/wdc/ ) bought the core design and the rights to license it many many years ago. These are the guys behind a few variants building on top of the 6502 as well, like f.e. the 65816 used in the Super Nintendo.

With apologies to Samuel Clemens, Western Design Center would tell you that the report of the 6502 lineage's death has been exaggerated.

The 6502 (or variants thereof) are alive and well and continue to be used in the embedded systems world. I don't have time to do a lot of research right now but a quick perusal of digikey.com shows 8-bit microcontrollers as low as $3.50 each in quantity while ARMs go for at least $17. For a $12 computer, that's a huge deal.

(Note: I'm getting these prices from hobbyist suppliers. I have no doubt that you can get 6502-ish processors for under a buck in quantity.)

Is the "classic" 6502 still made in 40 pin DIP format?

Yes. For new work, it's also available in PLCC and QFP packages; the latter is what I'm going to use for my project.

...and also, the classic Z80 CPU (plus peripherals like the CTC and PIO) is *still* manufactured - you can still homebrew an old-skool 8 bit computer.

More importantly, the 6502 is still available, along with the support chips it used. There's even a free-as-in-speech C cross-compiler available for it. I used it recently to rewrite the software for my Apple II beer-fridge controller, and that software will be ported to a 6502-based (65C02-based, really, but that's a minor difference) controller board I've designed (still need to send the board out for fabrication).

I can think of one area today that does compile software for 486s, 386s, and older chips: embedded devices. Here are new 486 based PCs that can be a firewall or any similar device, or can just run Linux for general purposes. There are even new 6502 and 8086/8088 based chips available. But yeah, that's a specialized area. You're right, most general purpose distros make the Pentium the minimum target. Have to go for an ancient or minimalist distro to get 386 compatibility.

Start with this site:
http://www.westerndesigncenter.com/wdc/

They are doing the current work on the 65xx processors. They even have a 16 bit version. Alas, I see no 32 bit goodness.

The 6502 was considered too limited even when it was in most cheap desktop computers. During the short period where Apple had a big share of office computing, the applications that made the Apple II successful didn't run on the machine's 6502 processor, they ran on a Z80 add-on card.

These folk seem to do good work. This can run up to 14MHZ but at 1MHZ draws 330 microamp and is 16bits.

http://www.westerndesigncenter.com/wdc/w65c816s.cf m

The also have W65C02 which can do 14 and draws 150microamp at 1Mhz

http://www.westerndesigncenter.com/wdc/w65c02s.cfm

Peripheral offloading is the *dreaded* I2O - EVIL EVIL EVIL. We could do with a simple free hardware variant using some variant of the 6502 or even the C-One. :-P

http://c64upgra.de/c-one/

These folk seem to do good work. This can run up to 14MHZ but at 1MHZ draws 330 microamp and is 16bits.

http://www.westerndesigncenter.com/wdc/w65c816s.cf m

The also have W65C02 which can do 14 and draws 150microamp at 1Mhz

http://www.westerndesigncenter.com/wdc/w65c02s.cfm

Peripheral offloading is the *dreaded* I2O - EVIL EVIL EVIL. We could do with a simple free hardware variant using some variant of the 6502 or even the C-One. :-P

http://c64upgra.de/c-one/

(replying to various bits of the other replies)

* The ][gs was not an Amiga. It was basically an Apple ][e, plus a 16 bit CPU (24 bit address space) and a sound coprocessor. The bevy of additional programmable processors (Agnes etc) in the Amiga made it a much more capable machine, game and multi-taking wise.

* Although the "][e on-a-chip" consolidation was neat VLSI, this same backwards compatibility was probably the single biggest reason for poor performance. Namely, the video buffers in "fast" (2.8MHz) RAM had to be shadow-copied into "slow" (1.0 MHz) RAM for the Mega ][ & eventual DAC. This affected even the new video modes-- all video writes had to slow to 1 Mhz, making fullscreen updates max out around 15 fps.

* The 65816 is still sold by WDC at speeds up to around 15MHz. In the early 90's there were two 3rd party cards (TranswarpGS, ZipGS) that would let you replace the original CPU with one of these new ones. The system was still limited by the aforementioned 1 MHz video writes, though.

* The Ensoniq 5503 DOC was much better than the 4 channel audio available in Macs or Amigas of the time: 32 wavetable oscillators with independent pitch/volume, reading from 64k of 8 bit samples (it took a few years for demo coders to get sample swapping-during-IRQ to work around the 64k limit.) Apple crippled it by only providing mono output, but again there were 3rd party cards.

* There was, of course, the ][e plugin card for Macs a bit later on. I think around the pizza-box Mac LC timeframe.

* The ][gs did do a few things before the Mac: color GUI, proportional scrollbars, progress bar during OS boot, and oh yeah, ADB keyboard and mouse. So the development cost wasn't entirely wasted...

Western Design Center, not Western Digital Corporation.

No, Western Digital doesn't make anything other than hard drives.

Apple IIgs did not use a 68000.

The IIgs's CPU is the Western Design Center 65C816, same as later used in the Super NES. It's a 16-bit CPU, 24-bit address bus (rather like a 286?), but it's an ugly bag on the side of the 6502 architecture.

-uso.

The SNES is a 16 bit machine... no chance of running linux, unless they use the ELKS project, or MINIX.