I don’t know why, but recently, as my love of really low-level hardware and my desire for low-power, high-performance computing has increased, I’ve been researching all the old, famous CPUs and operating systems. I started over what I swore was going to be a computer-free vacation by delving into programming in assembly for 680x0 Macintoshes (during which time I fell in love with 68k assembly), then explored ARM chips, and finally somehow or another ended up at 4:30 AM on a Sunday working on an assembler and cycle-accurate emulator for the MOS 6502. Resources I’ve found useful:

1. Assembly in One Step, which provides a superb overview of the 6502 execution model
2. A list of 6502 opcodes, including their mnemonics, size, and how many cycles they should take to execute
3. WLA DX, an open-source cross-assembler for a bunch of old CPUs (including the 6502, 65C02, 65816, and Z80), which lets me check that I actually understand the documentation and am writing my own implementation correctly

When I have something worth looking at, I’ll post it. On a lark, I’m actually writing my assembler and emulator in Free Pascal, a superb open-source clone of Borland Turbo Pascal. I’ll also post about how that goes. (The short version: my memory is better than the experience, but both are better than C++.)