6502.org

Well, I stand corrected then. It must have been the surrounding hardware that was the issue.

Very likely the display/backlight, they were power hungry beasts back then. Probably why the original gameboy didn't have one.

That's gonna be my guess - see also the Game Gear and its whopping 372ns playing time on a fresh set of 6 AAs.

I was one of the kids in the 90s that got a Game Gear. Can confirm.

Have you checked out viewtopic.php?f=4&t=4570 yet??

I had seen pictures of that one but not gone much further than that. It was the only one I'd found when I was looking. Looks cool.

I have the original Lynx and the smaller Lynx II. Plus, I have a Game Gear I need to finish recapping. I've never tested the battery times on these. Mainly because the screens are so terrible to look at. Which is sad. But maybe I should get them out over the holidays and do some battery testing.


On the topic of 6502-based gaming consoles, seems to me there are lots of portable Arduino based projects out there with tiny screens. They look truly awesome and I'd love to design one too.

But for me, I wished there were more homebrew 6502 consoles that connect to a TV or VGA monitor. But I guess those people prefer to just create NES games (which is great in itself).

The Game Gear's screen wasn't too bad, but holy mackerel, the Lynx's screen is almost completely unwatchable at points.

I've been thinking about making a VGA compatible console machine someday. Controller inputs actually seem easier to keep track of than all the of the ASCII codes required for keyboard inputs lol

There are lots of them around, I've designed 2 or 3 myself and they're a lot of fun both to design and write games for. It's surprising how capable they are. The only thing that frustrated me was putting different games on them - there are a few solutions out there with SD cards and external Flash chips, but I just feel icky about constantly having to rewrite the program flash memory. I know realistically that you'd have to be changing game multiple times a day every day for a few years to hit the 10,000 write lifetime. it just felt clunky to me.

That said, I'd still definitely recommend having a go at making one.


I think there's plenty of scope to cater for everyone's interests in the space. It definitely seems easy enough to build the computer, although I have noticed that a lot of the homebrew projects stop at the 4 line LCD. Satisfying graphics is a bit more of a challenge I think.

You could always use a microcontroller mapped to the address and data bus that just gives you an ascii code for the key pressed.

I know the purists avoid MCUs, but you can bet if the original systems builders had access to even a modest 8-bit MCU, your C64s and Gamegears would be full of them!

But they did! Motorola introduced the 6802 in 1977, by 1979 had three separate lines of MCUs based on the 6800, and the variations and options of those continued expanding well into the 80s. While the 6802 had only CPU, RAM and clock, with a companion chip for ROM, I/O and a timer, the 6801 (1979) included all that (expanded to 32 I/O lines) on one chip, and even threw in a serial port.

I have the feeling I'm totally missing something about what you were thinking when you said "MCU."

And did any of those 68xx MCUs cost $1 like an equivalent MCU today? I think that's part of it.

Sadly I've been unable to find contemporary pricing for the 68xx MCUs, though my understanding was that the MC6802 was designed to be low-cost, for some definition of "low cost." However, equivalant MCUs today (40 pin DIP with all the I/O etc. that implies) are not anywhere near as cheap as a dollar, as far as I can tell. The ATmega1284 series runs about $4 in 5K pricing (even in non-DIP packages), according to Amtel's web site.

But actually I'm not totally clear on what you were saying when you said, "if the original systems builders had access to even a modest 8-bit MCU, your C64s and Gamegears would be full of them!" Would this be in addition to or replacing the CPU, and what exactly would it be doing?

Check out this for example: https://jaycarlson.net/microcontrollers/

Probably all of those are superior to any 6800 based MCU from back then.

That's interesting, thank you. I was mostly being facetious and taking a cheap shot at purists who don't like MCUs in their 6502s

I think we take it for granted that we have fancy powerful desktop computers we can use to develop all of these things, with tools KiCAD and gcc just a click away. I can even design a pretty complex circuit board, upload it to a website and get a fully assembled working device in the post a few weeks later. The future is amazing.