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Re:Project-Nested: An NES Emulator Running on the SNES by Wowfunhappy on Sunday July 11, 2021 @05:24PM (#27804617)
Curious, is there a reason to think the 65816 wasn’t just a good CPU? From a supplier Nintendo had a good working relationship with?

I mean, we'll never know for sure, but what was the cpu landscape like? Were the other options clearly better?

Re:Project-Nested: An NES Emulator Running on the SNES by phire on Sunday July 11, 2021 @06:08PM (#27804858)
This has always been my view; It's the only CPU I know about that met the requirements.

Other 16bit consoles used an off-the-shelf 68000, combined with custom support chips. Nintendo made their own custom cpu silicon, an off-the-shelf soft-cpu and custom support logic for bus control and DMAs.

And there simply weren't that many 16bit soft-cpus available for Nintendo to license. You couldn't license the 68000 HDL, nor the 8086 HDL.

Re:Project-Nested: An NES Emulator Running on the SNES by djmips on Monday July 12, 2021 @05:18AM (#27808497)
"From a supplier Nintendo had a good working relationship with?" What do you mean by that? Nintendo did not have a working relationship with the supplier of the 65816 prior to development of the SNES.
Re:Project-Nested: An NES Emulator Running on the SNES by RetroSpark on Monday July 12, 2021 @06:02AM (#27808749)
Presumably this refers to Ricoh, who produced the CPUs and PPUs for both the NES and Super NES.
Re:Project-Nested: An NES Emulator Running on the SNES by christkv on Sunday July 11, 2021 @06:06PM (#27804843)
The Motorola 68000 is the only other one I can think off.