Here's one for the lawyers!

[Matt_H]

**Spoiler warning for On The Edge, the Commodore book**













If you've read through the book, you'll probably remember the section where the MOS Technology engineers discover that the CPU in the original Nintendo NES console is a blatantly ripped off version of their own 6502 - copied nearly verbatim, with the copyright notices cleverly scratched out.

The NES provided Nintendo with the means to leverage themselves into the position that made them the giant they are today, thanks to the non-compensated efforts of MOS and its engineers.

So the question is, could the current owners of that patent (Gateway or Tulip, or whoever the hell owns Commodore these days) find a lawyer clever enough to demolish Nintendo in a lawsuit demanding royalties and damages for the illegal use of the 6502?

That'd be a pretty interesting case if a Judge didn't laugh it out of court - a long dead technology company suing over something that happened more than 20 years ago. The statute is probably long expired... :crazy:

[ajlwalker]

I have read the book and my recollections are different.

I understood that they indeed copied the 6502 but didn't use any part that was proprietary.  They scratched those bits out.

It is therefore questionable if there is anything to sue over.

I have no clue about chip design so have to admit I don't really know much about what I'm commenting on.  The above was my understanding though.

[JimS]

Hmmm.... Isn't the 6502 itself a knock-off of the Motorola 6800? (not a typo! there was such a chip)

Speaking of that book... I was recently copying my scanned Amiga magazines onto the new HD big enough to hold them all... I came across the Byte 'obituary' for Commodore in 1994. The author says "It would take a book to explain the death od Commodore"... took a while, but guess so. :-)
 

 

[InTheSand]

Any chance you might be able to make the Byte obituary available online somewhere?

 - Ali

[Matt_H]

I think the 6502 was intended to compete with the 6800 and offered similar features, but it definitely wasn't a perfect silicon copy and was designed from scratch.

[gdanko]

Matt_H wrote:
I think the 6502 was intended to compete with the 6800 and offered similar features, but it definitely wasn't a perfect silicon copy and was designed from scratch.

If you read the Commodore book you will see how the 6502 has nothing to do with the 6800.

To everyone, BUY THE COMMODORE BOOK.. It is amazing. But the post-Tramiel stuff is sad/depressing. Up until that point it's wonderful and exciting to read.

[JimS]

From the Wikipedia....

The 6502 was designed primarily by the same team that had designed the Motorola 6800. After quitting Motorola en-masse, they quickly designed the 6501, a completely new design that was nevertheless pin-compatible with the 6800. Motorola sued immediately, and although today the case would have been dismissed out of hand, the damage to MOS was enough for them to agree to stop producing the 6501.

The result was the "lawsuit-compatible" 6502, differing only by a pinout re-arrangement unusable in a 6800 motherboard; now Motorola was apparently no longer interested.

[Oliver]

Wow, that's lame.  Pin compatible chips with different implementations are so common now.  Maybe there were more complicated legal issues than are immidiately apparent.

[JimS]

InTheSand wrote:
Any chance you might be able to make the Byte obituary available online somewhere?

 - Ali

Sure. Try here...

[img=http://img484.imageshack.us/img484/5606/byteripcommodore940ta.th.jpg]

[JimS]

Oliver wrote:
Wow, that's lame.  Pin compatible chips with different implementations are so common now.

Hmm... maybe so for trivial stuff like a quad input Nand package, but I think you could make a tougher argument when talking about a CPU. There's a lot of thought behind the design of the register layout & instruction set.  These days, that sort of thing is copyrightable (or maybe patentable). Just consider the 'cores' the FPGA fans talk about.