Skip to content

Comment on Eight More '8-Bit Era' Microprocessors

Comments

The RCA-1802 was used in the COSMAC Elf computer which was described as a hobbyist project to build in a series of articles in Popular Electronics 50 years ago. The Elf may be obscure but one thing developed on it (or its successor, the COSMAC VIP), CHIP-8, lives on -- it was (by some definitions) the first "fantasy console" like Pico-8 and TIC-80 today -- a virtual machine designed for writing action games.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COSMAC_Elf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIP-8

Oh yes, I cut my teeth on a Finnish 1802 based TELMAC in the 1970s. It all of 2 kb of RAM (in 16 chips manually soldered on the board), and room for another 2kb if anyone would need so much, as it said in the instructions. I might almost be able to reconstruct the instruction set now, it was so deep ingrained in my brain. Once I had nightmares directly in hex. Sold my first pieces of code on that CPU, a 2kb long "monitor" rom, maybe a bit like a BIOS in today's terms. Added .5 kb of new features and optimized it so it could still fit in that 2kb EPROM.

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.