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Comment by sehugg | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. I was poking around the MAME database and found that the Z80 was used as recently as 2010 by a company called Igrosoft to make video slot machines, along with some modern PLDs and support chips. They also use a YM2149-compatible sound chip for that authentic bleepy sound.

More details: https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blob/master/src/mame/drivers...

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This chip makes me laugh: http://www.keil.com/dd/docs/datashts/nuvoton/w78e054d_w78e05...

It's a clone of an intel chip from the 80s. It's still used to make new stuff. Here's a video of it

https://youtu.be/i3B_KKyntQE?t=15m52s

The 8051 family also has a huge amount of support tooling for it -- compilers, validation tooling, etc. For a lot of jobs where the 8051 lives, a new architecture would just mean an expensive set of validation tests for no real benefit.

Yup. The serial relay boards I resell are controlled by an 8051 variant. Those things are everywhere

Wow, you're right. I figured an 8051 was popular, but its derivatives make up >50% of the embedded market it seems. I am guessing most clones offer more than 128 bytes of memory.

These extremely popular media players around a decade ago were all Z80-based: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S1_MP3_player

Old 8-bit architectures like Z80, 6502, and 8051 are everywhere, because they're cheap (royalty-free, unlike e.g. ARM) and there's plenty of software and tools for them.

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