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As a derivative of my previous curiosity question I had a followup curiosity. Is there a future and/or an application for the 6502, the VIC and the SID chips ? I know they are still produced, and used. For example, I remember the 6502 makes a perfect controller chip for small appliances. the SID for sure is still present in some "retro" sound synthesizer, although my guess is that it's just emulated. What about the VIC ?

Community wiki question as there's no correct answer.

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Stefano Borini
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I would look at 6502.org, including its list of commercial support and list of projects.

Chip Uni
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For example, I remember the 6502 makes a perfect controller chip for small appliances.

I dunno about the VIC and SID chips (special purpose video / audio chips are different than a CPU), but I don't see any reason to use a 6502. There are tons of cheap low-power microcontrollers (e.g. Microchip PIC, Atmel, TI MSP430, etc) that are readily available, have more CPU horsepower than a 6502, have useful peripherals (ADCs, UARTs, built-in oscillator, etc), and have real-time debugging features. Why use a 30-year-old microcontroller?

Jason S
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  • Cost. The patents on the 6502 have expired, and Nintendo Entertainment System clones with a keyboard, mouse and 2 gamepads can be made for $10 - the http://playpower.org project is even trying to develop open-source software for them. – damjan Mar 09 '11 at 19:19
  • Latency of responding to interrupts. – Gaius Mar 07 '12 at 16:08
  • The 6502 still has usefulness in applications that need to respond quickly to interrupts. – Gaius Mar 15 '12 at 13:40
  • Right, I understood that -- like I said: care to elaborate? How is the 6502 quicker at responding to interrupts than, say, an MSP430 or a PIC18F? – Jason S Mar 15 '12 at 13:56
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I would think their future is limited. I don't know what kind of quantities are still being produced but you have to figure even the 486 is probably being produced in far greater quantities than the 6502. So even though the 486 might be overkill for some applications its availability determines its price thus making it more attractive to device manufacturers.

Then, as you say, the functionality of the 6502, VIC, and SID chips are easily emulated these days--even in software. So that might drive the demand for those chips down since its probably cheaper to emulate.

Darrell Brogdon
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  • You're neglecting IP cores, which make up the bulk of 6502 series sales these days. It's still quite popular in embedded systems, things where the 486 is too large or power-hungry. – Chris Charabaruk Aug 25 '10 at 18:29
  • @Chris Charabaruk: Do any of the 6502 cores include any of the 'accidental' NMOS 6502 instructions which got omitted from the 65C02? Some of them were quite handy, such as "LAX" (load A and X register with same value), "SAX" (store (A & X) without affecting flags), and "DCP" (decrement, and compare result with accumulator). Incidentally, while the documented maximum instruction time for the 6502 was 7 cycles, DCP (zp,X) and DCP (zp,Y) are 8 cycles. – supercat Oct 02 '10 at 19:46
  • No, they'd be 65C02, although I doubt it'd be too much to add some of them. Hope you enjoy VHDL. – Chris Charabaruk Oct 02 '10 at 22:58
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Cost means it still sells millions of units each year. 6502 is cheapest 8 bit CPU; doesn't have 6 month lead time like Stm8, braindead memory model like pic or 8051 or overpriced like avr, pic, msp430. To go cheaper you have to go 4 bit which is very limited. Admitedly arm chips like stm32f030 are only a few cents more but there is a company called Walmart that asks for products to be as cheap as possible so manufacturers cut cents of costs.

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