hello.

I'm student, I need to do a investigación about the 6502, I need to know about:

- Instruction Set
- Data Path
- I / O

This is the first time that I hear about the 6502. If you want to help me, write any useful information in the next email address: o.morera@costarricense.cr or
omd30@hotmail.com

Thank you.

Goto

http://www.westerndesigncenter.com/

and 6502.org.

I can't imagine these two sites not having what you want.

Bye,

Paul

omd (a student working on a paper) and I have been discussing things offline, and he has raised some questions I can't answer without taking a lot of time for research. Maybe someone else who has more computer game history in their head can tell us what processors Nintendo has used over the years. Did they start with the 6502? If so, whose 6502's did they use? Did they ever use Motorola processors? The 6800? 68000? Both? Whatever info you can supply will be helpful to him and interesting to me. Thanks.

Nintendo's NES (aka Famicom) used a custom CPU that was based on the 6502, called the 2A03. It was manufacted by Ricoh. One notable difference from a 6502 is that there is no decimal mode (though the decimal flag can still be set or cleared). Also, sound synthesis and DMA capabilities (used for accessing sprite RAM and Delta-PCM sample playing) were added to the CPU. It runs at 1.789Mhz.

Here is a pinout: http://nesdev.parodius.com/2A03_pinout.txt

A whole bunch more NES information is on my site here: http://nesdev.parodius.com/

The Super NES used a 65c816. I don't know if it's customized in any way, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was. It can run at 2 speeds depending on the access time of the ROMs used, either 2.68Mhz or 3.49Mhz(? I'm not really certain about those speeds).

I believe the Nintendo 64 used some kind of MIPS RISC CPU, but I don't know much about that stuff.

Also, Nintendo's arcade games (like Donkey Kong and Popeye) usually used a Z80, and later ones used a 2A03 (or 2) in addition to the Z80.

Finally, I should mention the Gameboy too. It used a custom version of the Z80, but I've never tried programming it so I know practically nothing about it. The Gameboy Advance uses one of those ARM CPUs (I don't know the details), but it also must have the old Gameboy CPU in there since it still runs the older games.

The Super Nintendo pretty much used a full 65816, probably licensed as a core. It had the full instruction set. The only weird thing is it appears the hardware engineers didn't really understand how bank zero worked on the 65816, and they mapped a part of bank zero into every single bank...

The N64 uses a MIPS R4300i if I remember correctly.

Toshi