Comment by drob518
6 months ago
Fun project. You might want to build an emulator for a real 16-bit CPU like a 6502. That would allow you to run real, existing software on it. That way you don’t have to write your own code.
6 months ago
Fun project. You might want to build an emulator for a real 16-bit CPU like a 6502. That would allow you to run real, existing software on it. That way you don’t have to write your own code.
6502 is an 8-bit CPU. Writing an emulator for it would be cool though.
It's interesting how arbitrarily CPU bitness is defined. Sometimes it's the register size, sometimes data bus width and sometimes the address width.
6502 has 8 bit registers, 8 bits wide data bus, and 16 bit addresses. Only PC register is 16-bit, but 6502 does have a zero page indirect 16-bit addressing mode.
Sometimes by register size, sometimes by ALU size, sometimes by data bus width. But I've never heard of a CPU bitness defined by address bus size.
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Yea, I was thinking about the address width, but I guess it’s really an 8-bit accumulator width. LOL, and I used to hack 6502 assembly language when I was a kid. As I get older, I’m starting to understand the term “senior moment.”
M68k is probably the best choice for that. Not because of the architecture but because it was so widely used.
68k has too many addressing modes. It is a pain to emulate properly.
Thank you! I think building an emulator for a real platform is going to be next on my list. A game console might be interesting to try especially or a 16-bit cpu like you mentioned.