The 6502 and its variants are still ubiquitous as well, powering millions of toys based on Sunplus/GeneralPlus microcontrollers [1] [2] [3] as well as the vast majority of bootleg game consoles that use variants of "Famiclone" hardware (or occasionally general-purpose 6502 MCUs [4]) to this day. It's fascinating how the toy industry went for the 6502 over the 8051 and PIC12 clones more common in other cheap electronics; I suspect it had to do both with the architecture's better performance (important for tasks such as audio decoding) and with the historical availability of experienced 6502 assembly developers as the game industry moved away from 8-bit platforms.
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The 6502 and its variants are still ubiquitous as well, powering millions of toys based on Sunplus/GeneralPlus microcontrollers [1] [2] [3] as well as the vast majority of bootleg game consoles that use variants of "Famiclone" hardware (or occasionally general-purpose 6502 MCUs [4]) to this day. It's fascinating how the toy industry went for the 6502 over the 8051 and PIC12 clones more common in other cheap electronics; I suspect it had to do both with the architecture's better performance (important for tasks such as audio decoding) and with the historical availability of experienced 6502 assembly developers as the game industry moved away from 8-bit platforms.
[1] https://spritesmods.com/?art=tamasingularity&page=2
[2] https://archive.org/details/furby-source
[3] https://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=37.%20Pixter#_TOC_a6fe...
[4] https://github.com/davidgiven/tony-sdk