<story><title>The Story of the Team Behind the 6502</title><url>https://www.team6502.org/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lnsru</author><text>Price is a bit high, but factory lead time of 1 week is amazing! Also very interesting Product Change Notification: “0.6μm process currently being used at TSMC”. Interesting, that TSMC still used such ancient node in 2013.</text></item><item><author>spectramax</author><text>You can still buy them from WDC, part #W65C02S: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.mouser.com&amp;#x2F;ProductDetail&amp;#x2F;Western-Design-Center-WDC&amp;#x2F;W65C02S6TPG-14?qs=sGAEpiMZZMvu0Nwh4cA1wSNu7hWmGrIdvYIw7nZ2DMI%3D&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.mouser.com&amp;#x2F;ProductDetail&amp;#x2F;Western-Design-Center-W...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>wmil</author><text>What&amp;#x27;s really interesting is how long 6502 variants lasted. They mentioned the NES, but the SNES also used a 16 bit variant similar to what the Apple IIgs used.&lt;p&gt;Starting in 1995 Nintendo included the SA1 chip in some cartridges, which was a 6502 variant running at a little over 10Mhz.&lt;p&gt;I actually think that Nintendo could have come out with a SNES Pro CD system in the mid 90s by including SA1 and SuperFX2 chips and having 4MB of RAM.&lt;p&gt;CD based systems with sprite &amp;amp; tile based hardware seem to have all failed due to lack of RAM. Just too memory hungry, especially once you start increasing the number of colours. The Neo Geo hardware (Motorola 68k &amp;amp; Z80) was able to produce hits after 2000 by using giant, expensive, cartridges.&lt;p&gt;They could have kept a 6502 based system going as a budget system (keeping the N64 as their &amp;quot;cadilac&amp;quot; system) until 2000.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vidarh</author><text>&amp;gt; Interesting, that TSMC still used such ancient node in 2013.&lt;p&gt;I guess for these type of products, where the wafers is not what costs (the 6502 is ~3.5k transistors), but overheads of dealing with small runs and packaging or investing in upgrades...&lt;p&gt;Anyone looking for large quantities of 6502-compatible cores presumably are mostly licensing cores to embed into something else.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Story of the Team Behind the 6502</title><url>https://www.team6502.org/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lnsru</author><text>Price is a bit high, but factory lead time of 1 week is amazing! Also very interesting Product Change Notification: “0.6μm process currently being used at TSMC”. Interesting, that TSMC still used such ancient node in 2013.</text></item><item><author>spectramax</author><text>You can still buy them from WDC, part #W65C02S: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.mouser.com&amp;#x2F;ProductDetail&amp;#x2F;Western-Design-Center-WDC&amp;#x2F;W65C02S6TPG-14?qs=sGAEpiMZZMvu0Nwh4cA1wSNu7hWmGrIdvYIw7nZ2DMI%3D&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.mouser.com&amp;#x2F;ProductDetail&amp;#x2F;Western-Design-Center-W...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>wmil</author><text>What&amp;#x27;s really interesting is how long 6502 variants lasted. They mentioned the NES, but the SNES also used a 16 bit variant similar to what the Apple IIgs used.&lt;p&gt;Starting in 1995 Nintendo included the SA1 chip in some cartridges, which was a 6502 variant running at a little over 10Mhz.&lt;p&gt;I actually think that Nintendo could have come out with a SNES Pro CD system in the mid 90s by including SA1 and SuperFX2 chips and having 4MB of RAM.&lt;p&gt;CD based systems with sprite &amp;amp; tile based hardware seem to have all failed due to lack of RAM. Just too memory hungry, especially once you start increasing the number of colours. The Neo Geo hardware (Motorola 68k &amp;amp; Z80) was able to produce hits after 2000 by using giant, expensive, cartridges.&lt;p&gt;They could have kept a 6502 based system going as a budget system (keeping the N64 as their &amp;quot;cadilac&amp;quot; system) until 2000.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mschuster91</author><text>Sure, the node is ancient, but the factory is long ago written off which means that (aside from energy, materials and labor expenses) all income is pure profit. As long as there are enough  orders to cover the expenses plus a couple percent of profit margin, it makes sense to continue operating that factory.</text></comment>