Reverse Engineering the MOS 6502 CPU [video, Michael Steil]

Marstedt · Post by **Marstedt** » Fri Jan 14, 2011 2:05 pm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWqBmmPQP40

I thoroughly enjoyed this presentation on deconstructing the 6502 (and vintage silicon in general). Awesome stuff!

http://www.pagetable.com/?p=517
http://events.ccc.de/congress/2010/Fahr ... 59.en.html

"The MOS 6502 CPU, which was designed in 1975 and powered systems like the Apple II, the Atari 2600, the Nintendo NES and the Commodore 64 for two decades, has always been subject to intense reverse engineering of its inner workings. Only recently, the Visual6502.org project has converted a hi-res die-shot of the 6502 into a polygon model suitable for visually simulating the original mask at the transistor level."

More download links from 27C3 here:
http://mirror.fem-net.de/CCC/27C3/mp4-h264-HQ/

Kweepa · Post by **Kweepa** » Tue Jan 18, 2011 12:54 pm

Amazing work being done!
Also amazing that the 6502 only has 3510 transistors - and can be represented in VHDL by a mere 7k of data (two bytes per transistor?). [EDIT] I think I must have heard that wrong in the talk. It seems it's more like 55k.