About MAD-65

"We are building it not because it is easy, but because we thought it would be easy."

This machine grew out of one idea: a retro-style, hand-buildable hobby game console that, despite every 8-bit limitation, always runs its games at a smooth 60 Hz — and by design will not allow anything less.

Why monochrome

One bit per pixel is a consciously chosen limitation, taken so the hardware is free for other things. It is also a retro aesthetic that does not feel dull today — in 2026 it simply looks cool. Way cooler than 2, or even 16, colours.

A 400×300 mono framebuffer is also 15 kB, which two 65C02s can fill convincingly in a frame. Colour would have meant more memory, more bandwidth, and a machine that did the same things slower. The whole design falls out of that one decision.

Authors

• Mateusz Matysiak — initial concept, software layer (firmwares)
• Przemysław Węgrzyn — architecture, hardware layer

Credits

• The music in the built-in diagnostic demo is an original piece by Maro Szczerski.
• The 65C02 core used in the reference simulator is Arlet Ottens' open-source microcoded design.
• Firmware is assembled with the cc65 toolchain.
• The reference simulator is built on Verilator and SDL2.
• madsim is written in Rust, on the w65c02s CPU core, winit and pixels for the window, cpal for audio, gilrs for gamepads and emu2413 for the YM2413.
• 6502 assembly code assisted by Claude Code.

Licence

CERN-OHL-S (hardware) plus GPL (firmware and tools)

Contact

mm{at}codepainters.com

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