The MOS 6502 Processor

The MOS 6502 was launched in 1975 by the company MOS Technology. The engineering team working on designing the MOS 6502 were formerly part of Motorola and worked on the Motorola 6800. The MOS 6502 is essentially a simplified, faster, and cheaper version of the Motorola 6800. Due to the low price point, many companies started using this processor for their products. The 6502 and its variations are now found in many famous products, including Atari 2600, Nintendo Entertainment System, Apple II and many more! To read more about the history and development of 6502, refer to the well written wikipedia article on it!

Although it was groundbreaking about 50 years ago (2022 at the time of writing this), processors have evolved at a crazy pace. The 6502 has only a handful of registers and 64KB of memory. In addition, the 6502 has only 151 opcodes, making it an ideal emulation candidate.

---