The need for speed 6502 100 mhz

The 6502 was the CPU in my first computer (an Apple II plus), as well as many other popular home computers of the late 1970s and 80s. It lived on well into the 1990s in game consoles and chess computers, mostly in its updated “65C02” CMOS version. Here’s a re-implementation of the 65C02 in an FPGA, in a pin-compatible format that lets you upgrade those old computers and games to 100 MHz clock rate

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I have questions concerning what programs would benefit from such a drastic clock speed increase on up to 'is there any way to make one of these for the apple iiGS where we could see something less expensive than ‘arm, leg, kidney, lung, and first born’ prices for accelerated performance.

Similarly, is there a way to clock it DOWN for those programs, typically games, where timing is affected by clock speed?

Indeed the machine speeds up and slows down as necessary: see the long thread over on the 6502 forum:

As to what programs might benefit: fractals, compilers, spreadsheets - anything which has work to do! Even text adventures can sometimes benefit, if they use compression.

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The thing that I find most amazing is it literally could be a stealth upgrade if you put the black chip package cover from the original on it, unlike the FPGA vicII chip replacement I’m watching Jan Beta cover on youtube Right Now.

Same footprint as the original. That’s… Huge.

But the true test, will it work in the APPLE I? :slight_smile:

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It should work great, as long as the software doesn’t depend on the strange behavior of the broken ROR instruction. Character output will still be slow as molasses, though …

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It would be fun to run AppleWorks on this thing next to Microsoft Office on the latest PC (with 50 times the clock and 16 million times more memory). We would be able to see how much perf

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…OK you have a point there. That is a drag race I wanna see.