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There was the 6809 in between. I remember BYTE magazine's cover story, "A Microprocessor for the Revolution". Well, not quite, as it turned out! :)
by mek6800d2 4y ago
There was the 6809 in between. I remember BYTE magazine's cover story, "A Microprocessor for the Revolution". Well, not quite, as it turned out! :)
- mark-r 4y agoI never got to use the 6800, but did use both the 6809 and 68000 in assembler. Both were a joy to work with.
- KerrAvon 4y agoI never encountered the 6800, but I did talk to people in the 90's who thought the 6800 was pretty bad and the 6809 pretty good. The 68000 is really a different class of CPU entirely, so I'm not sure why folks are discussing it here. Only the name is similar.
- danachow 4y agoThe 6809 had some hobbyist/consumer prominence on this side of the pond in the TRS-80 CoCo - and some European similars. And there was a multitasking OS written for it - OS-9. OS-9 has an interesting history in its own right. It was ported to a wide range of subsequent architectures. All sorts of applications - Fairlight synths, Philips CD-i, most of the traffic lights in the US in the 80s and 90s to name a few.
- ncmncm 4y agoThe 6809 was used in a production gadget, the Vectrex, the only vector-graphic consumer videogame console. It came with a screen that worked like an oscilloscope -- no raster, just an electron beam sweeping along the line. So, no jaggies. As it was necessarily monotone, games came with clear plastic color overlays for the screen. 6809 was notable as the first 8-bit microprocessor with a multiply instruction: 8x8->16 bits.
- ddingus 4y agoIt was also in some Williams games, including my favorite: DEFENDER. Crazy what could be done just pushing pixels at 1Mhz!
- deaddodo 4y agoThe 6809 was an answer to the 6502. They needed something reasonably “better” than the 6502 to justify the price tag. Unfortunately, for them, the 6502 and it’s variants were too entrenched at that point.