The 6502 in The Terminator

In the first Terminator movie, the audience sees the world from the T-800s view several times. It is wellknown that in two instances, there is 6502 assembly code on the T-800s HUD, and many sites have analyzed the contents: Its Apple-II code taken from Nibble Magazine. Here are HD versions of the shots, thanks to Dominik Wagner: This is the first assembly snippet:

This is the second assembly snippet:

There are some assembly equates:

On the left, these are the assembled opcodes of the second assembly listing, reaching from LDY#10 to SEC. On the right, there is output of a run of the checksum application Key Perfect on a file names OVLY.OBJ, which prints a 16 bit checksum for every 050 bytes:

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 5th, 2009 at 0:01 and is filed under 6502, archeology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

33 Responses to The 6502 in The Terminator

1. Donncha O Caoimh says: 5. May 2009 at 2:20 Thats brilliant. Nice to see the familiar old ASM commands pop up there! 2. Jamie Le Souef says: 5. May 2009 at 2:40 So does this mean that the Apple-II is really from the not to distance future? Jobs must have worked for Cyberdyne Systems! 3. Darkstar says: 5. May 2009 at 3:17 I remember noticing that back in the early 90s when I first saw the movie (and that was on a cheap PAL version). At that time I was learning C64 assembly and I immediately recognized all the LDAs and LDXs :) I forgot about it until today 4. Eldito says: 5. May 2009 at 3:22 Hilarious, although very romantic. 6502 code on T-800 HUDs definitively beats other famous Hollywood stereotypes introduced in War Games like the sound made by chars being printed to low-bandwidth terms, blinking lights on the WOPR, etc. Back to Terminator, I wonder what is displayed on more advanced Ts like the T-888 seen in the Chronicles series, or the T-1000! Ed. 5. Marc says: 5. May 2009 at 5:46 This is precisely why the robots became self-aware. You cant be giving the robots access to their own source code of course theyre going to look at it and start modifying it to suit their own needs. At the very least, the developers should have removed the comments and obfuscated it. Its just common sense.

6. links for 2009-05-05 | Nerdcore says: 5. May 2009 at 22:03 [...] The 6502 in The Terminator pagetable.com (tags: Terminator Apple Movies Coding) [...] 7. jason kreno says: 7. May 2009 at 11:16 @Eldito probably perl, if a real programmer built the 880. Ruby if it was an elitist web developer. 8. vaxboy says: 7. May 2009 at 12:30 Thank you for this. Where would we be without the old 6502 in the Apple ][, Commodore 64, VIC20 and PET? Its a bastard cousin of the 6800 and the 6809 was to be the heart of the Macintosh, but by the time they fished the damn thing (four years later), they went with the awesome 68000 chip. So did the Amiga. Damn Atari and Microsoft/Intel to hell for blowing up the universe and costing us 20 years of suffering with their Indian software-knock-off of the Amiga and dirty tricks to keep us pinned down editing CONFIG.SYS until they could kill DIGITAL, steal the VMS guys and rip-off the plans for the Alpha chip to build the Pentium. Fuckers. Ok, going back to my happy place of the 6502now Im thinking about its predecessor the RCA 1802thank you for making my day. Time for my nappy poo. 9. Peter Balogh says: 7. May 2009 at 13:08 Whoa, why all the hating at Atari? I learned 6502 assembly on an Atari 400, and thats how I recognized the Terminator code as well. Im reading a book called On the Edge anyone interested in the 6502 will definitely want to check this out http://www.amazon.com/Edge-Spectacular-Rise-FallCommodore/dp/0973864907/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1241730498&sr=8-1 10. Jo Davis says: 7. May 2009 at 14:29 OMg dude thats like totally insane! RT http://www.privacy-web.net.tc

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Jacek says: 7. May 2009 at 15:01 The new terminators (the ones that look much more attractive than Arnold) use JavaScript ;)

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Sarah Connor says: 7. May 2009 at 16:19 Funny. This is from the same genre of the big panels, full of blinking buttons in sci-fi movies. Or the sounds coming from the computer after each keystroke. Just a dumb effect to fool the layman. This is the perfect example of the motto: Movies are to entertain, not to teach.

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Phil says: 7. May 2009 at 16:30 Why does the HUD need to include a compass? Shouldnt that be built in and the direction already known by the cyborg. Does it really need to look at a HUD to see that? I guess the same goes for the code.

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Enlightenment says: 7. May 2009 at 18:29 This proves that Apple is Evil !!!

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Steve Jobs says: 8. May 2009 at 3:55 Yes, we are proud that the T1, T2 and T1000 all run on Mac OS X Leopard.

16. (T-800)CPU says: 8. May 2009 at 8:39 [...] The 6502 in The Terminator pagetable.com [...] 17. alphazero says: 8. May 2009 at 9:12 Check out the geeks in hollywood: http://staging.spectrum.ieee.org/print/8849 18. Triler de 4 minutos de Terminator Salvation | DevNote says: 10. May 2009 at 3:30

[...] relacionado a aquella lejana primera parte de los 80s rescatamos este artculo que revela que el HUD del temible T-800 mostraba en realidad cdigo mquina del CPU 6502 de la [...] 19. vaxboy says: 11. May 2009 at 14:10 @Peter Balogh, I do praise the Atari 400/800 which were among Jay Miners final custom chips efforts before turning to the gorgeous Amiga. It is the AtariST (and later) that I despise as filth. Why? Back in those days, it took 4 years to fabricate a new chip. Amiga Inc. had formed (with Jay Miner, Dale Luck, RJ Michael and others) to do just that. After years of baking, the Amiga appeared. 40 year old Commodore Business Machines moved in to buy it, but before it could happen, a fight broke out between the CEO and the Chairman who had just gained control of the company. The CEO of 40 yers quit and tried to buy Amiga Inc. on his own, in a new company. The Chairman of Commodore objected and completed the purchase of Amiga Inc. The new company that the former CEO of Commodore had founded knew it was DOOMED because it didnt have 4 long years of 22 hour days to recreate the chipset. So what did it do? It put together a turkey which did what the Amiga did in software (instead of hardware), so it ran like 1000x slower and was a dog and he priced it like a Commodore 64 (sweat spot) way way below the price of an Amiga (because he didnt have the extra cost of the hardware chips on his Bill of Materials and because he was using cheap Indian laborers in America). So what did he decide to call this new piece of crap? Being a million years old, he did not realize the name was tainted to forever be associated with VIDEO GAMES and he, in fact, reportedly paid $45K to buy the name Atari, which had obviously gone defunct after Jay Miner took off years earlier. Then he marketed his low-cost piece of crap as an Atari ST for years up against the Amiga. The public began to think of the Amiga and Atari as being similar products and somehow associated with video GAMES, thus destroying the credibility of the Amiga in business leaving the door wide open for the vastly inferior Macintosh and eventually Windows products. In the end, Amiga and Commodore will killed with Bill Gates lamenting at how he had been wise enough to steer clear of that disaster (by not supporting it with Office and BASIC as he did the early Macs). Jay Miner, seeing his lifes work go up in smoke over a slow motion decade, died a little while later of kidney problems, he was 62 Windows 3.11 (the first real Windows) was 2. The CEO of the new Atari, a holocaust survivor, retired and the last I heard, he let his two boys run what was left of the company. Meanwhile at Apple, they had fired Steve Jobs and the French idiots who took over R&D basically had an Amiga 1000 in the basement they were surgically dissecting and running upstairs every few days to proclaim their new inventions such as QuickDrawGX (aka Amiga GfxBase), AppleScript!! (aka ARexx), PlainTalk!! (aka Amiga Speech Synthesizer), nuBus!! (ZorroBus!) and the list goes on and on. Those maggots got theirs when CALPERS fired the Pepsi Drinker, the Board who put him there and the French Guys, brought in real dudes from Rockwell and the Navy/DOD who quickly realized they needed to buy Steve Jobs backand the rest his history. Only one part Im leaving out. WE ALL LOST 15 YEARS OF OUR LIVES! Even if you were not into Tech, how much of your life was spent editing CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT or dealing with crappy DOS programs while your kids grew up without an Internet and all the great things that came from multimedia-computers with a graphical user interface. Im sure it all makes perfect sense to the man who saw his family murdered by the Nazis as a small boy, but it was just wrong. Ok, well going back to my happy place now. Remember, you asked! 20. 4 minutos de Terminator Salvation en HD says: 11. May 2009 at 21:15 [...] leyenda Urbana cuenta que a aquella lejana primera parte de los 80s rescatamos este artculo que revela que el HUD del temible T-800 mostraba en realidad cdigo mquina ensamblador del CPU [...]

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Peter William Lount says: 14. June 2009 at 14:25 The 6502 assembly listing is actually the Apple ][ DOS 3.3 listing! It was quite funny the first time I saw Terminator on the opening day! Likely I was one of the very few in the theater anywhere that day who could read that display and know what it said! It did take me out of the movie experience for a moment though... but hey, if the terminator had a 6502 that's cool. I'm of course a brain with 6502 encoded in my dna strands. Naturally during the construction of Gemstone Warrior and Gemstone Healer video games I disassembled the entire Apple DOS eventually chopping away most of it including the sections that the terminator kept - they were just too slow. I gather the terminator evolved in the later movies. Funny that I'm studying the AMD64 architecture in detail again today and come across this article. I was just going to post a similar one on my blog... you beat me to it... Anyway, here's to Apple DOS 3.3! Here's to the terminator and their cheesy effects! Maybe I'll did my Apple ][ out and find the listing! That would be way cool for a blog post!

22. Appleslices IIe says: 26. July 2009 at 11:31 [...] was reading the comp.sys.apple posts today and saw a post from PZ that lead his blog displaying the 6502 code from the Terminator movie in great resolution. I immediately realized that these images would make a great desktop, but here [...] 23. markov_chain says: 11. August 2009 at 9:24 @vaxboy: Very much appreciate your play-by-play of the home computer evolution I grew up in Europe blissfully ignorant (what kid isnt) of happenings behind the scenes so I enjoy this sort of commentary and connecting the dots. For the record I started with ZX Spectrums and a bunch of other 8-bit kit computers and then moved to the Atari ST family. But in my heart I always knew Amigas were heads and shoulders above, just never could afford one ;) 24. Jim says: 11. August 2009 at 21:21 So it looks like the Futurama gag with Bender and the 6502 went deeper than I thought Want me to precludify him, like some kind of dispatcherator? 25. U. N. Owen says: 16. January 2010 at 14:37 Dude, it was a Cyberdyne 6502 emulator, so it could run the programs of the day. Haha.

26. In case you are wondering if Apple will take over the world... says: 9. June 2010 at 8:29 [...] movie was busy listing out Apple II assembly code while it was walking around killing people http://www.pagetable.com/?p=64http://www.pagetable.com/docs/terminator/00-37-23.jpg [...] 27. What I'm really wondering... says: 25. September 2010 at 13:19 is what is that log-log plot in lower left corner on one of the screens. Looks interesting. 28. Digital Archaeologists Figure Out What Made the Apple I Tick (Hint: The Terminator) Cambodia Phone Market News says: 11. January 2011 at 16:27 [...] Apple I and Apple II, as well as the Atari and Nintendo game systems (and powering several famous robots). It contributed, in other words, to the birth of both personal computing and the development of [...] 29. idknow says: 23. February 2011 at 16:00 Folks, thanks very much for the threading of real-life, movies, the firts computer we grew up with, and all the funnies. I grew up with ][+, i could mental-assemble and dis-assemble code. it was awesome. 30. Vasectoma y Recanalizacin says: 25. August 2011 at 11:45 Eyaculacin Precoz The 6502 in The Terminator pagetable.com 31. The 6502 in ?The Terminator? ? pagetable.com | BlogueIsso! says: 13. December 2011 at 4:47 [...] The 6502 in ?The Terminator? ? pagetable.com [...] 32. Augmented Reality: The Singularity Draws Near | The CamBlog says: 27. June 2012 at 13:04 [...] via pagetable.com Share this:EmailShare This entry was posted in New Media and tagged augmented reality, [...]

33. Detecting Light Coronax's Project Blog says: 2. September 2012 at 13:53 [...] We know from the movie Terminator that the T100 runs on a system using 6502 assembly language. If you try this at home, there is a small but nonzero chance of creating [...]