The release tarballs of the Neo6502 Fimware repo do not contain a pre-built emulator for macOS. Therefore, I had to compile the firmware and emulator from source. These are the steps I took to get the Neo6502 emulator running on a 2021 MacBook Pro with an Apple M1 Pro chip. I started using this machine recently after my 2019 MacBook Pro died. It was, therefore, not setup for development. As such, it is a relatively complete guide to setting up a development environment for Neo6502.

  1. Install Xcode Command Line Tools

    xcode-select --install

  2. Install Homebrew

    /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL [<https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh>](<https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh>))

  3. Install git

    brew install git

  4. Install pyenv

    brew install pyenv

  5. Set up Zsh for Pyenv

    echo 'export PYENV_ROOT="$HOME/.pyenv"' >> ~/.zshrc
echo '[[ -d $PYENV_ROOT/bin ]] && export PATH="$PYENV_ROOT/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.zshrc
echo 'eval "$(pyenv init -)"' >> ~/.zshrc

    Restart Zsh

    exec "$SHELL"

  6. Install Python 3.13

    pyenv install 3.13

    pyenv global 3.13

    source ~/.zshrc

  7. Install the dependencies

    brew install arm-none-eabi-binutils cmake sdl2 tass64
brew install --cask gcc-arm-embedded
python -m pip install gitpython pillow pyserial

    Additionally, I installed the build dependencies for Python.

    brew install openssl readline sqlite3 xz zlib

  8. Clone the Neo6502 Firmware repo

    git clone [<https://github.com/paulscottrobson/neo6502-firmware.git>](<https://github.com/paulscottrobson/neo6502-firmware.git>)

  9. Compile the firmware

    cd neo6502-firmware
make firmware

    When that’s complete, compile the emulator for macOS.

    make macos

  10. To run the emulator…

    cd emulator
./neo

  11. Voila!

Neo6502.png