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The Visual 6502

visual6502.org

21–27 of 27 posts

Re: The Visual 6502

#21

It is a fun way to benchmark your system. I managed to get 4.1hz on my 13th gen i5 work laptop. Let's see an M-series chip blow that out of the water. ;) EDIT - It was 4.1Hz in advance mode. Actually runs at between 22Hz and 44hz depending on each time I run it. Odd to have such a wide performance variation. I will just blame Windows and some power management setting/thermal throttling.

M4 Max, Brave — 93Hz highest, usually around 90Hz. On Advanced it started at 22Hz & steadily dropped from there into the single digits as it ran. Safari held around 62.xHz. On Advanced it started at 40Hz & also kept dropping.

Re: The Visual 6502

#22
post #11

I wish these guys would have released this amazing looking 6502 in circuits: https://www.evilmadscientist.com/2016/6502/

Agree. I would pay for it.

I haven’t followed progress, but they did say it would likely cost $2k-$4k if they ever produced them to sell.

Re: The Visual 6502

#23

It is a fun way to benchmark your system. I managed to get 4.1hz on my 13th gen i5 work laptop. Let's see an M-series chip blow that out of the water. ;) EDIT - It was 4.1Hz in advance mode. Actually runs at between 22Hz and 44hz depending on each time I run it. Odd to have such a wide performance variation. I will just blame Windows and some power management setting/thermal throttling.

High 60's to 70 on a Firefox|Fedora|Ryzen AI 9 HX.

Re: The Visual 6502

#24
Shameless plug: I wrote a 'remix' a couple of years ago over a Christmas break using WASM+WebGL+DearImGui with better rendering performance, integrated assembler and a couple visualization tools (using the visual6502 team's original reverse engineered netlist data, and https://github.com/mist64/perfect6502 as simulation loop):

- 6502: https://floooh.github.io/visual6502remix/

- Z80: https://floooh.github.io/visualz80remix/

- 2A03 (this was contributed): https://floooh.github.io/visual2a03remix/

- source code: https://github.com/floooh/v6502r

(the simulation generally runs throttled to 1 half-clock-cycle per frame, so don't use it as any sort of benchmark)

Re: The Visual 6502

#25

It is a fun way to benchmark your system. I managed to get 4.1hz on my 13th gen i5 work laptop. Let's see an M-series chip blow that out of the water. ;) EDIT - It was 4.1Hz in advance mode. Actually runs at between 22Hz and 44hz depending on each time I run it. Odd to have such a wide performance variation. I will just blame Windows and some power management setting/thermal throttling.

Linux, Core i7-8700, Firefox, GTX1650, nothing special, and I'm getting 45-55Hz out of it.

So you're probably not far off. I can't imagine more modern chips than mine would run it significantly faster, none of the "tweaks" would help here.

Re: The Visual 6502

#26

Shameless plug: I wrote a 'remix' a couple of years ago over a Christmas break using WASM+WebGL+DearImGui with better rendering performance, integrated assembler and a couple visualization tools (using the visual6502 team's original reverse engineered netlist data, and https://github.com/mist64/perfect6502 as simulation loop): - 6502: https://floooh.github.io/visual6502remix/ - Z80: https://floooh.github.io/visualz80…

The link to Perfect6502 is interesting. It says that it supposedly gets speeds of 1/30th of 1MHz - i.e. ~30KHz - on high-end 2025 CPUs. Which is very slow of course, but still ~1000x faster than what people are reporting in this thread.

Of course it's in JS rather than C, but V8 is really good, well within an order of magnitude - not three - of native, at least with well-written code. I profiled the original Visual6502 and at a glance it sure does look like it's losing a ton of performance to rendering (so good call there).

I have to wonder what the limit is. Even Perfect6502 looks like it's all single-threaded and CPU-driven, which really isn't making the most of modern machines. But I don't know if this is a task that could be efficiently split across cores or dispatched to the GPU (and I can't even begin to know whether SIMD might be useful); of course hardware itself is fundamentally parallel, but the synchronization might kill you?

Re: The Visual 6502

#27
post #26

Shameless plug: I wrote a 'remix' a couple of years ago over a Christmas break using WASM+WebGL+DearImGui with better rendering performance, integrated assembler and a couple visualization tools (using the visual6502 team's original reverse engineered netlist data, and https://github.com/mist64/perfect6502 as simulation loop): - 6502: https://floooh.github.io/visual6502remix/ - Z80: https://floooh.github.io/visualz80…

The link to Perfect6502 is interesting. It says that it supposedly gets speeds of 1/30th of 1MHz - i.e. ~30KHz - on high-end 2025 CPUs. Which is very slow of course, but still ~1000x faster than what people are reporting in this thread. Of course it's in JS rather than C, but V8 is really good, well within an order of magnitude - not three - of native, at least with well-written code. I profiled the original Visual65…

The core of the simulation are these two functions:

https://github.com/mist64/perfect6502/blob/09fc542877a843182...

As far as I understood it, this basically re-evaluates the state of a 'dirty list' of transistors though all their connections, and loops until the node list has 'settled' again into a stable state (e.g. state changes from the last loop didn't cause trigger new state changes). Haven't thought about how this could be threaded or simd-ified.

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