The Mighty 6502 Chip

Nintendo Entertainment System

The NES, also known as Famicom, launched in 1983 in Japan and 1985 in North America, where the video game industry was headed downhill due to a deluge of poor games and over-saturation. Nintendo's second home console became an enormous success, establishing consoles as a mainstream market in Japan and pulling the North American industry back to its feet.

The Mighty 6502 Chip

Alphazero

1653

Forum Posts

2448

Wiki Points

Followers

Reviews: 23

User Lists: 10

Edited By Alphazero

I thought this might be of some general interest. Behold, the mighty 6502 chip. A modified version of it powered the original Nintendo Entertainment System as well as the Atari 2600. It had two layers of Mario rendering goodness, and a small enough number of circuits to photograph and trace out where things went. You'd have trouble doing on modern chips without a serious microscope.

The NES took the 6502 design and coupled it with some audio logic for their custom CPU. The GPU is off to the lower left on the NES board.

6502 chips were everywhere back in the NES heydey. They had a fairly straightforward instruction set as well as pretty good support for sprites and other things you'd want to get Mega Man to jump. There were also a few "undocumented" instructions. It wasn't anything sneaky, their behavior just wasn't defined, but the chip still accepted them. Some clever people found ways to use them to make their code faster which is pretty astounding.

These days chips need to be designed with large amounts of computer aid, but these were more or less laid out on graph paper and then put into production. Life was simpler then, but -- to be honest -- the original Metal Gear is no where near as fun as the latest.

More history and archeology ahoy: