On Hacking MicroSD Cards

Re:On Hacking MicroSD Cards by radicalbyte on Sunday December 29, 2013 @12:43PM (#6980394)

So now my microSD card has as CPU 100x faster than my first computer (C64), and access to storage at least 10^5 times larger. Amazing.

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Re:On Hacking MicroSD Cards by gingerlime on Sunday December 29, 2013 @02:32PM (#6980884)

It is indeed. There are (albeit not micro) SD cards with built-in wireless and an embedded webserver. hackable of course[1]

[1] http://haxit.blogspot.com/2013/08/hacking-transcend-wifi-sd-... [2] HN Discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6195627

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Re:On Hacking MicroSD Cards by userbinator on Sunday December 29, 2013 @10:41PM (#6982907)

But it may still be an 8-bit 8051 core, from around the same era. You may also find that your monitor's embedded controller is a 6502. These old architectures just won't die, they tend to turn up everywhere now.

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Re:On Hacking MicroSD Cards by vidarh on Monday December 30, 2013 @06:05AM (#6984086)

WDC, run by Bill Mensch, the "other" 6502 designer next to Chuck Peddle, claims on their website hundreds of millions of licensed 6502-compatible cores per year from WDC alone (though it's not backed up by anything, and it's not clear how current that claim is, but it doesn't seem impossible given the presumed price point for volume license), which would put it near the top of the top 10 CPU architectures by core volume (ARM is in the 3 billion range apparently; Power/PPC, MIPS and x86 in the 300-500 million range) still. Quite amazing.

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Re:On Hacking MicroSD Cards by kabdib on Sunday December 29, 2013 @02:48PM (#6980953)

Also, that CPU costs about 20 cents (probably less).

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Re:On Hacking MicroSD Cards by davidw on Sunday December 29, 2013 @05:42PM (#6981820)

IIRC, the floppy drive for the C64 had a 6502 just like the C64 did.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_1541 indicates that my memory is correct, but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64 says that the chip on the C64 itself is a bit different, though.

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Re:On Hacking MicroSD Cards by vidarh on Monday December 30, 2013 @05:57AM (#6984064)

The C64 had a 6510 (later 8510) that is different from the 6502 pretty much only in that it had 8 general purpose IO lines, some of which were used for bank switching (to map the ROMs in and out of memory over the RAM), and some for the tape connector at least. I don't remember what all 8 lines were used for.

They're pin-compatible enough that in some devices you can swap them around and get things to work (e.g. putting a 6510 in a 1541 has a decent chance of working unless the GPIO pin register clobbers something important in the 1541 memory map; with the reverse you'll at least have problems, though a 6502 in a C64 might work if you only run things like cartridges and/or put the right voltage on the right pins to map the ROMs into place).

Also, the Amiga 500 keyboard had a 6502 compatible CPU with built in PROM and RAM as well (MOS 6570).

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