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Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

Author seems to tie things off after the C64 era, but the 6502 had a lot more to give. The penultimate video gaming on the 6502 is IMHO the Atari Lynx. 6502 + almost Amiga-esque (David Morse of Amiga fame was involved) custom graphics processor that could do 4096 colours, unlimited sprites, hardware multipliers and dividers, bunch of custom processing stuff to augment the CPU

The combination of the excellent interrupt responsiveness of the 6502 with a display chip of that caliber is pretty cool. Too bad it wasn't a market success really.

The SNES is also pretty damned amazing (yeah, 65816, but close enough)

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The 65816 is a fascinating chip, even though it's a dead end in the evolution of home computing. It falls in a category with the Z8000 and maybe even the 80286: backwards compatible with their predecessors, but extending them in odd, idiosyncratic ways. Processors evolved and mostly discarded the vestigial weirdness of the original 8-bits, but its a special kind of fun to revisit assembly language programming in that style with some of the oppressive constraints (address space, addressing modes, minimal registers) lifted.

The original Game Boy had some very interesting capabilities as well. In some aspects it outclasses the NES, in some others it lags behind.

(I specifically mean that the NES only had sprites and a single background layer. The Game Boy had an additional 'window' layer for drawing eg status bars, but also capable of doing funky things in eg boss battles. It also got some capabilities built-in that the NES needed extra chips on the cartridge for.)

Looking at what the Game Boy could do, you get the sense that they carefully optimized for the exact specialised capabilities they needed for games at minimal transistor-count cost. Being such a late 8-bit system helped a lot with that.

Turbografx 16/PC-Engine has Hu6280 CPU that's an extended 6502 ISA, with some awesome instructions. Ran at 7Mhz too.

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