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Comment by TillE | Hacker News Reader

> The galaga arcade was driven by three Z80 CPUs

I'm not super familiar with arcade hardware, but it's always fascinated me how the Z80 and the 6502 dominated the market for reasonably-priced CPUs for about a decade. You'd just use one for everything. The 68k would eventually come into the picture, but even into the 1990s you still had a major console like the Super Nintendo using a 65816, which is essentially a 6502 with 16-bit extensions.

Games were getting really big in the 80s, but it took a long time for hardware R&D to kick into gear.

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Main reasons for SNES was its last minute scrapped backwards compat had it pick that chip. They made up for it having a great audio chip and PPU and a bus that you could just bring your own CPU (like sa-1 which is basically a snes 1.5 cpu)

There is a emulator project to get NES games working on the SNES:

https://github.com/Myself086/Project-Nested

So far they are up to 89 games that play perfectly.

So have they tried running NES games with this emulator, on an SNES emulator?

You could use a SNES emulator on a computer or use a flash cart and play it on the real hardware.

> but it's always fascinated me how the Z80 and the 6502 dominated the market for reasonably-priced CPUs for about a decade.

Only a decade? I would argue they had at least 15 years of dominance and were being used en masse for ~20 (the Genesis, SMS, NES, Gameboy, etc were using them well into the 90s, as you mentioned).

True… the Atari 2600 was released in Sept 1977 and used a 6502 variant. The 6502 was released in late 1975 by MOS Technology, but I don’t think any sold until 1976.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_2600

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS_Technology_6502#Introduc...

One of the reasons for this was the fact that there were so many home computers being made with them too .. so you could go to work and hack on the Z80 eval board/PCBA, then come home and brush up some code on telly, bring it back on tape and so on .. I made a lot of progress as a programmer in the 80's by building my own suite of home computers with the same CPU's as we were using in embedded projects at work ..

Can't really do that much these days, although a similar vibe can be had if you work in embedded linux and use ARM .. pretty nice to take code from an rPi home machine and run it on the industrial systems as well ..

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