Minecraft Mod Adds Emulated 6502 Processor

New submitter Direwolf20 writes "The Red Power 2 mod for Minecraft has recently been updated, and it adds a fully emulated 6502 processor that can be programmed in assembly, but comes with a Forth interpreter. From the article: 'Eloraam calls it the 65EL02, because "it supports all the 6502, 65C02, and part of the 65C816 instruction set" as well as "a set of completely new instructions and two addressing modes. Since the 65EL02 is an 8-bit CPU, Eloraam didn't have as many options for programming environments as we have on today's 64-bit computers. While it's possible to program the 65EL02 in assembly language, for general use she chose to implement a Forth interpreter. Further technical information about RedPower Control's 65EL02 is available on Eloraam's blog RP Control Internals, and on the RedPower wiki's page for Red Power Control.' (Fair disclosure: The video linked in the article is mine.)"

Re:That's great and all but...

[X0563511]

No. But you'd know that if you had bothered to look up what a 6502 was [wikipedia.org].

Re:At what point does 'improvement' become a downs

[toygeek]

It got my son interested in programming. Not this mod, but another. He actually programmed a pong game on his own over the course of a week using lua in a minecraft mod that has a computer that runs lua.

Re:So what's the fuss?

[History's Coming To]

See this video of Conway's Game of Life [youtube.com], in Minecraft, using only native bricks in a very old version of the game. Everything from abacuses to basic calculators and full processor simulations have been done, so this may well just be all of that "landscape" wrapped into a more manageable few bricks and a GUI stuck on it.

Reference implementation

[tepples]

Because the model that a JavaScript- or Python- based emulator uses can be implemented just as easily in other languages. The goal is to have a reference implementation against which other implementations' accuracy can be checked.