As the 6502 by itself was too slow to control both the game play and the vector hardware at the same time, the latter task was delegated to the DVG.

* The program was stored as a linked list of lines ; a or took O ( n ) ( linear ) time, and although Applesoft programs were not very long compared to today's software, on a 1 MHz 6502 this could be a significant bottleneck.

Powering the system was an Atari SALLY 6502 ( Atari's slightly custom 6502, sometimes described as a " 6502C ") processor running at 1. 79 MHz, similar to the processor found in home computers ( Atari 8-bit, Apple II, Commodore 64 ) and other consoles ( Atari 5200 and Nintendo Entertainment System ).

MicroFORTH was later used by hobbyists to generate Forth systems for other architectures, such as the 6502 in 1978.

This microprocessor was the first low-power CMOS processor chip, quite on a par with the 8-bit 6502 that was being built into the Apple II desktop computer at that time.

Gone, for example, was the full 64K of RAM and the secondary 6502 CPU ; instead, the ECS offered a mere 2K RAM expansion, a built-in BASIC that was marginally functional, plus a much-simplified cassette and thermal-printer interface.

A British computer that used the 6502 was the BBC Micro, manufactured by Acorn, Ltd.

The primary change from the 6502 was the addition of an 8-bit general purpose I / O port ( only six I / O pins were available in the most common version of the 6510 ).

It was a major advance over both its predecessor, the Motorola 6800, and the related MOS Technology 6502.

The 6809E was used in the TRS-80 Color Computer ( CoCo ), the Acorn System 2, 3 and 4 computers ( as an optional alternative to their standard 6502 ), the Fujitsu FM-7, the Welsh-made Dragon 32 / 64 home computers, and the SWTPC, Gimix, Smoke Signal Broadcasting, etc.

The 6502 was so cheap that many people believed it was a scam when MOS first showed it at a 1975 trade show.

However successful the 6502 was, the company itself was having problems.

Numerous versions included Apple II, TI 99 / 4a, DEC PDP-11, Zilog Z80 and MOS 6502 based machines, Motorola 68000 and the IBM PC ( Version II on the PC was restricted to one 64K code segment and one 64K stack / heap data segment ; Version IV removed the code segment limit but cost a lot more ).

The Acorn Business Computer ( ABC ) plan required a number of second processors to be made to work with the BBC Micro platform, but processors such as the Motorola 68000 and National Semiconductor 32016 were unsuitable, and the 6502 was not powerful enough for a graphics based user interface.

A trip to the Western Design Center in Phoenix, where the 6502 was being updated by what was effectively a single-person company, showed Acorn engineers Steve Furber and Sophie Wilson that they did not need massive resources and state-of-the-art R & D facilities.

The design was led by Wilson and Furber, and was consciously designed with a similar efficiency ethos as the 6502.

The Z80 ( i ) was an improved implementation of the Intel 8080 architecture, which was faster, more capable, and much cheaper ; alongside the 6502 it was one of the most popular 8-bit processors for general purpose microcomputers and other applications.

The 8-bit 6502 architecture and the first MOS Technology 6502 chip were designed in 13 months by a group of about 9 people.

The MOS Technology 6510 is a microprocessor designed by MOS Technology, Inc., and is a modified form of the very successful 6502.

MOS had previously designed a simple computer kit called the KIM-1, primarily to " show off " the 6502 chip.

language constructs were designed to map cleanly to 6502 opcodes.

The hardware consists primarily of a standard MOS 6502 CPU, which executes the game program, and the Digital Vector Generator ( DVG ), vector processing circuitry developed by Atari themselves.

BBC BASIC is a programming language, developed in 1981 as a native programming language for the MOS Technology 6502 based Acorn BBC Micro home / personal computer, mainly by Sophie Wilson.

After achieving success with the BBC Micro computer, Acorn Computers Ltd considered how to move on from the relatively simple MOS Technology 6502 processor to address business markets like the one that would soon be dominated by the IBM PC, launched in 1981.

Adding to the problem was the fact that the 6502 code supplied by Microsoft was undocumented.

Apple's portion of the computer industry at this time was transitioning from the 8-bit 6502 CPU technology that started it, to the newer 16 / 32 bit Motorola 68000 used by computers such as the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST and the Apple Macintosh.

It emulated its predecessors by utilizing a custom chip called the Mega II and used the new Western Design Center 65C816 16-bit microprocessor running at, which was faster than the 8-bit NMOS 6502 and CMOS 65C02 processors used in earlier Apple II models.

A new disc version released by Superior Software in 1986 was enhanced to take advantage of the BBC Micro Model B's successors including the BBC Micro Model B +, Master 128 computers, the optional 6502 Second Processor or sideways RAM, if they were fitted.

* Compiling native code for emulators for older now-obsolete platforms like the Commodore 64 or Apple II by enthusiasts who use cross compilers that run on a current platform ( such as Aztec C's MS DOS 6502 cross compilers running under Windows XP ).

The Sony SPC 700 is the S-SMP's integrated 8-bit CPU core manufactured by Sony with an instruction set similar to that of the MOS Technology 6502 ( as used in the Commodore 64 and Vic 20, Apple II, BBC Micro and the original NES ).

A simple, yet characteristic, example of applying the KERNAL is given by the following 6502 assembly language subroutine ( written in ca65 assembler format / syntax ):

A MOS Technology 6502 chip that operates at 894 kHz and a speech synthesizer by Votrax generates the sound effects and Q * bert's incoherent expressions, respectively.

WDC was founded in 1978 by co-holder of the MOS Technology 6502 patent, Bill Mensch, himself a former MOS employee.

The 68xx line was to be followed later by the 6502 processor that was used in many early " home computers ", such as the Apple II.

This process was made more difficult by the fact that the MOS Technology 6507 used in the 2600 was a pin-reduced version of the 6502 which had no support for hardware interrupts.

Moving the sprite vertically is achieved by block moving ( or rotating ) the definition of its glyph in memory which is quite fast in 6502 machine language, even though the 6502 lacks a block-move instruction like the 8080, because the sprite is exactly 128 or 256 bytes long and so the indexing can be easily accommodated in a byte-wide register on the 6502.

The 6507 and 6502 chips use the same underlying silicon layers, and differ only in the final metallisation layer.

Shepardson had written a number of programs for the Apple II family, which used the same 6502 processor, and were in the middle of finishing a new BASIC for the Cromemco S-100 bus machines ( Cromemco 32K Structured BASIC ).

The MOS Technology 6502 used the same 2-phase logic internally, but also included a two-phase clock generator on-chip, so it only needed a single phase clock input, simplifying system design.

As the 6502 by itself was too slow to control both the game play and the vector hardware at the same time, the latter task was delegated to the DVG.

The Atari 2600 and NES are particularly interesting because they use the 6502 instruction set, likely familiar to people who have programmed 8-bit home computers, such as the Commodore 64 or Apple II.