[Koshkin]

Unfortunately, it seems that for all practical purposes, and as much as we love it, 6502 in all its (still existing) incarnations is all but dead.Even MIPS has been dying, albeit slowly and painfully. The unpleasant truth is that as we now all know that ARM is currently the only sane choice for a hobbyist project (see, for example, Color Maximite 2), and we can only hope that RISC-V will someday replace it in the hands of CPU aficionados, but in the times when for a few pennies we can have an 8-pin ARM microcontroller, this is a no-brainer. (ESP32, being quite popular, due to its highly integrated nature and the focus on IoT is a somewhat different proposition.)

[LIV2]

"What is sane for a hobbyist project" depends on the project and the wills of the designer.

I've built a couple of 6502 based systems now and added VGA output and floppy support which probably would've been easier with an ESP32 or something but my goal was to learn how to do this the hard way.

[the_af]

I suppose it depends on the kind of hobbyist. If you want to learn how to code for the 6502, for nostalgia's sake -- a powerful motivator for many hobbyists -- then learning to code for ARM will not scratch that itch.

You can always emulate the 6502, it doesn't have to be the real hardware.

[chongli]

A big part of the appeal of the 6502 is with the retro community. If your goal is write an NES game (and there’s quite an active community doing just that) then you have no other choice than to learn the 6502.

That’s fine though. The 6502 is a classic CISC processor with a fairly high level instruction set. This makes it fun for humans to program. I think where people get into trouble is when they try to bring up these complicated tool chains and high level languages. That’s a mistake. Program the 6502 directly in assembly with a nice macro assembler. It’s the best way to go.