Work · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Discrete6502 – one thing led to another
Disclaimer, I have not yet placed the order. But JLCPCB have so far excepted all files and config so I have 1 more button to press. If anyone see some obvious mistake please send feedback. This project grew out of curiosity. Loved the https://monster6502.com/ project but that is on another level. Here I tried to stay "reasonable" and added a Raspberry Pico 2 W on the back to drive it all. But also, was curious if Claude could pull this off. Guess I will have to place that order to call the cards.
Discrete6502 is a hardware project that recreates a 6502 microprocessor using discrete components, inspired by the Monster6502 project but designed to be more practical in scale. It incorporates a Raspberry Pico 2 W to… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1IM
Building a 10BASE-T Ethernet transceiver (receiver and transmitter) with discrete logic chips
2024 · qdiv.dev · its alternatives →
- 2
Yet another 6502 emulator that one day dreams of being an Atari 2600. - haldean/x6502
2013 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 3VB
2021 · tejotron.com · its alternatives →
- 4
Micro Kernel / Bootloader for Ben Eater's 6502 Computer - janroesner/sixty5o2
2020 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 5
Finally got my hobby OS up and running on real hardware. I love the old IBM thinkpads, so thought it was the perfect machine to get it working on. Been working on it for quite some time now, but this has been a big milestone!
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 6IW
2021 · mdw.la · its alternatives →
- 7
Hey HN, Recently built an Apple II emulator and at the same time was getting into Tiny Tapeout and decided it would be cool to build a cycle-accurate 6502 CPU and an MCU for it. It's cycle accurate and the core itself should be 100% compatible with a stock MOS 6502 (would need to still test this though!). Tested on some FPGAs (fomu, ulx3s) and works great, hoping to get it taped out in the upcoming IHP26a shuttle. Also as part of the project I built a bus multiplexer to allow memory/bus access from an RP2040 to work around the limited pin count on Tiny Tapeout. This let's you load up…
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 8
The Recovery Kit 2 is another cyberdeck that for me is part computer, part backup device, and part functional movie prop. It's been fun to build, and the HN community has been great with ideas- especially around hosting and getting me off Squarespace. I hope you all enjoy!
2024 · doscher.com · its alternatives →
- 9MI
2025 · carimbo.run · its alternatives →
- 10
Raspberry Pi 2▲2882nd generation with faster processor and more memory
2015 · raspberrypi.org · its alternatives →
- 11
Finally finished my little CPU project, RISCY-V02. I built it (with Claude) to challenge the notion that the 6502 was a "local optimum" in its transistor budget. Given the constraints of 1970s home computers (~1 MHz DRAM, so raw clock speed doesn't help), could RISC have been a better design choice? This design argues yes: pipelining, barrel shifters, and more registers beat microcode PLAs, questionable addressing modes, and hardware BCD. Highlights: 8x 16-bit general-purpose registers (vs 3x 8-bit on 6502) 2-stage pipeline (Fetch/Execute) with speculative fetch 61 fixed 16-bit…
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 12
Hi! me and my friends together built an 8 bit CPU implemented in Logisim purely from scratch. The control unit of this system does not implement the generic microcode ROM or any kind of RAM. This was made purely from discrete logic gates and coded the system to run different programs. key features: Custom 16-instruction Harvard ISA, 8-bit fixed format, 4 general purpose registers Hardwired control unit built entirely from AND/OR gate logic matrix Dual-phase clocking to eliminate race conditions Bootstrap Control Unit that cold-boots via ROM-to-RAM transfer Early-exit conditional…
Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 13
The 6502ctl project is an Arduino controller for the 6502 CPU. The controller controls all 6502 pins, including the clock signal and interrupts, and simulates an address and data bus with attached memory and an output peripheral. The controller includes a clock-cycle debugger with disassembler. An assembler is also included with the project.
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 14
3D printing is such a fascinating field of technology, so a couple months ago, I decided to take a deep dive and learn how they actually work! This took me to one of my very first PCB projects, a small, cheap, 3D printer motherboard. While it's not the most cutting edge board, I learned a lot and I fully documented my process designing it (https://github.com/KaiPereira/Cheetah-MX4-Mini/blob/master/J...), so other people can learn from my mistakes! It runs off of an STM32H743 MCU, has 4 TMC stepsticks with UART/SPI configurations,…
Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15
A while back I wrote a CHIP-8 emulator (which is considered the Hello, World! of emulators and is more accurately a virtual machine since historically CHIP-8 was an interpreted language running on top of the COSMAC VIP to make game programming easier). But a few months ago I got really interested in embedded software, so decided it would be neat to port my emulator to a STM32 MCU and design a console around it as a learning experience, since CHIP-8 never existed as a physical system. I didn't know much about embedded software when I began, and even less about electronics, but I managed to…
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 16
DAN64 is a open software and open hardware project to build an 8-bit microcomputer using an AVR microcontroller.
2015 · usebox.net · its alternatives →
- 17SA
Hello all :) I made this BBS for fun and thought you all would enjoy it. It's not perfect, but it's been a fun exercise! see it: https://asciinema.org/a/Emg6SWrXMV6cehfQxrw1GRu75 try it: ssh -p 2223 shhhbb.com host it: https://github.com/donuts-are-good/shhhbb/releases/latest why? Every year I challenge myself in some new way, this year it is to push one project per week. You might recognize my static site generator [0] or my releaser for go [1] from previous posts as one of these weekly projects. If you want to join me in doing this, it's…
2023 · donuts-are-good.github.io · its alternatives →
- 18
PewCB▲67Vibe-routing is coming. Desktop PCB Factory is here.
Sep 2026 · pewcb.com · its alternatives →
- 19
This project contains no code from Linux, BSD, Minix, or any other OS. Everything up until this point is written entirely from scratch, including a pure microkernel (that only implements multiprocessor priority scheduling, memory management, and interprocess communication), a work-in-progress implementation of the standard C library, and a variety of servers that provide drivers and other essential OS functionality. At the time of writing this post, the servers provide drivers for the keyboard, NVMe SSDs (that works on real hardware), a Unix-like virtual file system (with a single root…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 20AT
2015 · wiki.nesdev.com · its alternatives →
- 21
This is a personal project I've been working on and off for the past few years. It's a set of tools that have allowed me to prototype quickly small (and increasingly bigger) kernels, and create userspace programs to interact with them. Supports riscv64, amd64 and i386. The intel port has been tested and used on real hardware, from big dual-socket Xeon machines to an old X220. It is all C, I have plan to make rust bindings for the kernel library. But again, they're plans at this stage. Porting to new architectures is relatively simple, a basic port to riscv took me a couple of weeks of…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 22
Battery info program for x86-64 Linux laptops in 307 bytes of machine code - meribold/btry
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 23AT
A 3.16M-parameter INT4 transformer running entirely in the on-chip memory of a Xilinx Kria KV260. Zero DRAM in the token loop, 59,965 tok/s on the fabric, bit-exact. Chat with it live.
Aug 2026 · mikeayles.com · its alternatives →
- 24
A new programming language rooted in Pure Mathematics
2025 · leetarxiv.substack.com · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →