Ironically (and sadly) the Z80 was discontinued not very long after this piece was published.

We still have the venerable 8051 for anyone who likes old architectures!!

	▲	spicyjpeg 43 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The 6502 and its variants are still ubiquitous as well, powering millions of toys based on Sunplus/GeneralPlus microcontrollers [1] [2] [3] as well as the vast majority of bootleg game consoles that use variants of "Famiclone" hardware (or occasionally general-purpose 6502 MCUs [4]) to this day. It's fascinating how the toy industry went for the 6502 over the 8051 and PIC12 clones more common in other cheap electronics; I suspect it had to do both with the architecture's better performance (important for tasks such as audio decoding) and with the historical availability of experienced 6502 assembly developers as the game industry moved away from 8-bit platforms. [1] https://spritesmods.com/?art=tamasingularity&page=2 [2] https://archive.org/details/furby-source [3] https://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=37.%20Pixter#_TOC_a6fe... [4] https://github.com/davidgiven/tony-sdk

grishka 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm sure clones are still being made.

The cpu possibly, but I had a hard time trying to find the support chips (ctc, sio/pio, etc)...

	▲	HeyLaughingBoy 3 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Do you have an actual use for them? I might have a few tubes of Z80-CTC & SIO in the basement if I haven't given them all away yet.
	▲	avadodin 40 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Many applications didn't even use those peripherals so I suppose production ended earlier. The Z80 could even refresh the RAM by itself. It was not like the 8080 which required two support chips only to function.