6502 the heart of the NES

I recently found my old Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) sitting in my loft and decided to plug it in again after almost 20 years! To my surprise it still worked and playing Mario Brothers was still really good fun. After completing Mario again ;-) I started to wonder what made this old beast tick so I decided to take my old friend apart.

I found at its heart was 6502 processor running at lightening speed (well 26Mhz)  and picture processing unit (PPU). After doing some research online I found out that the 6502 inside the NES was a slightly modified version that contained a audio processing unit APU and a clock divider circuit. I wanted to play around with the 6502 / PPU so I added IC sockets to the main board so I could easily remove / replace the IC's.

Now all I need to do is create a proto type development board for the 6502 IC to sit in !