TXY (6502 wishlist)

By Kodiak

Being endlessly in search of faster executing 6502 assembly code to keep raster time to a minimum on interrupts in Commodore 64 games, I often wish MOS had made a TXY and a TYX 6502 instruction (maybe they didn't due to hardware issues); without them, we have to do something like this:

LDX ZPVAL ; ZPVAL = a Zero Page value
LDY ZPVAL

That takes 6 cycles and uses 4 bytes, but if we can tolerate the a-reg being written, we can use the illegal opcode LAX, which trims that down to 5 cyles + 3 bytes:

LAX ZPVAL
TAY

Obviously, the big downside (in many coding scenarios) is that the a-register is affected by the LAX operation.

But with a TXY instruction, this would have been:

LDX ZPVAL
TXY

5 cycles, 3 bytes, so the same performance-wise as the LAX solution, but with the a-reg untouched!

Now you might be thinking, is it worth it for 1 measly cycle saved?

Well, if you are serious about keeping a tight eye on saving raster time, then of course it's worth it, especially in a sequential coding situation in which this kind of operation needs to occur repeatedly, in which case the cycles saved with TXY (or conversely, TYX) would be cumulative and could be the difference between a viable effect and abandoning it.

(Besides, I know many if not most experienced coders can't bear to waste a single cycle if it can be avoided!)

Some other similar wishlist entries:

• LAX in immediate mode (a functional version thereof, that is)
• LAY (y-index version of LAX)
• LXY

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