[HN Gopher] Complete working transistor-scale replica of the cla...
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Complete working transistor-scale replica of the classic MOS6502
microprocessor
Author : adrian_mrd
Score : 124 points
Date : 2022-12-03 08:49 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (monster6502.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (monster6502.com)
| tubetime wrote:
| MOnSter 6502 creator here for any questions...
| java-man wrote:
| Such a beautiful board! Now do an 8080 :-)
| timbit42 wrote:
| I'd rather an 1802 or 6809.
| jeffbarr wrote:
| At the first day on my first professional programming job in
| 1980 or so, my new manager told me that I would be writing a
| brand-new 6502 macro assembler, in 6502 assembly language, to
| replace the slow & limited one supplied by the vendor (Ohio
| Scientific).
|
| Under his guidance I wrote the assembler, and even earned a
| raise after simulating the hashing function in FORTRAN and
| finding it lacking.
|
| I still have very fond memories of that job and of the 6502,
| and would be interested in purchasing a replica as soon as you
| go into production!
| yupis wrote:
| Looks beautiful
| jmole wrote:
| wow, this is gorgeous. I've had similar ideas, but the execution
| here is just phenomenal.
| pnw wrote:
| This would make some incredible, if expensive, wall art for those
| of us who got started on the 6502.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Great piece of work!
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| Why do they expect it to be so expensive? ("It is definitely not
| cheap to make one of these. We are currently estimating the cost
| at between $2k - $4k.")
|
| With 4769 components on the board, that would suggest a cost per
| component of over 40 cents. Looking at JLCPCB prices for SMD
| assembly and components, I would have expected an order of
| magnitude less.
| guidoism wrote:
| I have wondered the same but I think SMD wasn't as cheap a
| decade ago as it is today for one-off designs. I wonder what a
| modern day jlc version would cost.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| If they do manage to sell it in the $200-400 range, I know
| what's going to be hanging on my wall.
| jakzurr wrote:
| Heck yeah!
|
| But actually, I'm thinking a nice framed picture might be
| pretty nice.
| anadem wrote:
| from https://monster6502.com/ : "the cost is actually dominated
| by the component and assembly costs of an extremely large
| number of tiny components, each of which is individually quite
| inexpensive. "
| WalterBright wrote:
| Yup. And the cost of debugging the board because of a mistake
| in the assembly.
| tubetime wrote:
| don't forget assembly costs. very few boards have such a large
| number of components, and they tend to be big and expensive
| server boards...
|
| larger boards are also more difficult to work with in general.
| JLCPCB plays a few tricks to keep the costs down on the smaller
| boards, but once you go past certain limits, the price goes up
| significantly.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Most of the components are leds and transistors (and some
| resistors) and those are (still) dirt cheap... you can get
| whole microcontrollers for ~3 cents a piece [0] (if you buy a
| few thousands). PCBs are comparatively cheap, few tens of
| dollars, depending on the process, and with pick-and-place,
| assembly is also relatively cheap.
|
| so yeah.. maybe they're making them in some more expensive
| country or use some exotic components.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYhAGnsnO7w
| dis-sys wrote:
| look at that photo on the top, simply a piece of art. just
| incredible.
| usr1106 wrote:
| At 50 kHz, can you understand anything from looking at over 300
| LEDs? Or is it just the impression that things are happening too
| fast? Which isn't really the case for 20 times slower than the
| original 1 MHz.
| tubetime wrote:
| at 50KHz, the LEDs mostly appear to be on, albeit at different
| brightness levels. but with the clock rate set much lower (say,
| below 50hz) it looks a lot more animated.
| [deleted]
| mdp2021 wrote:
| Very surely loops should show a rhythmic pattern. I am sure I
| have seen equivalent project that run on the browser...
|
| Check e.g. Visual 6502 -
| http://www.visual6502.org/JSSim/index.html
| jmole wrote:
| Would be fun to watch this hardware alongside a sorting
| algorithm visualization like this:
| https://www.sortvisualizer.com/quicksort/
| fsckboy wrote:
| from back when computers had really small memory, I've seen
| software that did sorting on the user screen because the
| screen at that point was extra available free memory!
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| At 1Mhz you could tell certain things, like looping or crashed
| by looking at the front panel of my Altair 8800.
| usr1106 wrote:
| Was the design leaked or published or reverse-engineered? Of
| course today no vendor should have a problem with that kind of
| secrets becoming public.
| rzzzt wrote:
| The author mentions the Visual 6502 project in the credits
| section at the end of the page, which is (was) a long-running
| reverse-engineering effort to map the chip at the transistor
| level: http://visual6502.org/
| tubetime wrote:
| yes, it is based on their reverse engineering work. i hand-
| copied every transistor from their netlist into a schematic
| and went from there.
| phkahler wrote:
| Would be great to display this next to a real delidded 6502 to
| show the level of integration. Then tell people "that was in the
| 1970s" and explain how big their phone chip would be. Best visual
| of scaling ever.
| masklinn wrote:
| An other thing which would be interesting is a 6502 in a modern
| process, the 6502 had already had such an update in the 8502 (a
| smaller and less power-hungry 6510). Or possibly a machine-
| code-compatible version, if the die shots have revealed known
| issues which could be fixed by redoing the logic.
|
| Or at least an FPGA with a 6502 burned in (like the 65F02) but
| I'm not sure it would be _smaller_ as i assume the FPGA has a
| _lot_ more hardware than the 6502 (even needs).
| kazinator wrote:
| They would make a million of them one wafer, and then
| struggle to find them. :)
| rzzzt wrote:
| WDC still sells the 65C02 (uses CMOS logic instead of NMOS):
| https://www.westerndesigncenter.com/wdc/chips.php
|
| One fix in this variant is that all reserved/undocumented
| instructions are NOPs, they don't do anything unexpected.
| Another one is that you can stop the clock entirely and it
| will not lose track of what it was doing earlier.
| greenbit wrote:
| DC to light! Well .. DC to medium-wave broadcast
| frequencies anyway.
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(page generated 2022-12-03 23:01 UTC)