Yokemate of Keyboards
Posts: 4977 from 2009/1/28
From: Delaware, USA
Quote:redrumloa wrote:
Quote:
Jim wrote:
@ redrumloa
I have an Atari XE with a 6809 processor, expanded memory, an video enhancement board and a second sound chip.
You do realize the Atari XT computers were released in 1985 while the C64 was released in 1982? A little bit apples and oranges. A better comparison would be the
128D. Basically Atari's last 8bit compared to Commodore's last 8bit. The 128D(and 128) hadI both an 8510 and Z80A. The 128 line sold about 6M units worldwide.
Quote:
I have no particular love for the C64.
It uses a 6502 based processor and I was mever impressed with that.
Why? From a programmer's perspective?
There were a few really nice
65816 based accelerators for the C64 and C128 if you like those better. They are a bit hard to come by these days and expensive, but a few projects out there may bring a new one in the future.
6809 over 6502?
Yeah, from a programming perspective.
Multiply instruction (with a divide command added the Hitachi 6309), a 16 bit accumulator (2 in the 6309 concatable into a 32 bit accumulator), support for position independant code (6502 limitions across contiguous memory addresses are really annoying), a lot of other differences.
It was too expensive though.
The 6502 didn't offer much improvement over the 6800 (except for price).
The 6809 did.
The higher speed Western chips are interesting though particularly the 65816.
And I have on hand some Western 65C21 PIA adapter chips because they are rated at such a higher clock speed than Motorola, Hitachi, or MOS peripheral interface adapters.
The HD63C09 is rated at 3 MHz and will overclock to 4 or 5 MHz, but everyone elses PIA chips top out at 2 MHz.
But you're right, interest in 8 bit is still strong. Its simple enough to consider machine code and directly hammering the hardware.
It makes a good starting point to learning how microprocessors actually work.
And if challenging its still kind of fun.
[ Edited by Jim 23.06.2016 - 20:38 ]"Never attribute to malice what can more readily explained by incompetence"
