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Comment by bitexploder | Hacker News Reader

I have been deep in the 6502 hole writing an emulator and watching Ben Eater. Throw off the shackles of your massive computers and compute for the sheer fun of it! Almost everything about the 6502 and writing assembly for it is relevant in some way to modern systems programming. You get to trim all the fat from programming and computing and see the ingenuity of computing unfolding before you in a tiny little 2^16 address space. Where you are going there isn’t even a div instruction. It is a cool way to compute and as retro as it is if you were ever interested in systems programming this is a cool, nostalgia themed, way to start.

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The irony, when I grew up writing programs for my Atari in 6502, I dreamed of having the amazing resources of computers today. Now people are going back to the simpler times. Sort of the programmer equivalent of LARPing medieval times I guess.

It is just nice to switch modalities and make things simple. 6502 is a sweet spot of capability and simplicity for me.

It's amazing how far we've come in raw computing resources available on a desktop in 40 years.

Check the 2018 video of an Atari 8-bit emulator which can run 182 apps simultaneously (no idea what CPU is powering the box):

http://www.emulators.com/xformer.htm#XFORMER10

I definitely dreamed of more powerful computers, but working using libraries that wrap libraries that wrap libraries (and on and on) and never needing to think about the hardware was not something I really anticipated. There’s something nice about working with hardware and software that calling it LARPing feels dismissive. Arduinos are fun in a similar way and aren’t medieval.

dismissive? I think maybe that's your attitude to LARPing? I think LARPing is great fun! Nothing wrong with it, going back to period where things were different, less technology but still interesting skills involved to do things we take things for granted these days.

"Grass is greener on the other side."

Plus you can make new NES games.

And a whole bunch of other systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS_Technology_6502#Computers_...

And, more recently, the Commander X16.

That is my eventual goal. There are many NES emulators out there, but this one will be mine :)

I also wanted to release a decent pure 6502 with a good command line monitor that lets you explore programs easily. Step. Poke memory. Set registers. Good CLI. We’ll see. It really helps to have a decent playground when getting started :)

Heh. That would've been nice. Back in the day, after we walked in the snow uphill to work both ways, we wrote our code, ran it through the cross-assembler, burned EPROMs (after waiting an extra 15 minutes to erase the last ones we used because someone lost the dang tube), plugged 'em into a socketed NES cartridge and really hoped it worked.

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