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One thing that I think that is important to understand is that these machines, and this code, is still out there, working. People are still playing these games

One thing that I think that is important to understand is that these machines, and this code, is still out there, working. People are still playing these games (MAME) and the emulation scene that has arisen due to the fanboix fervour has really pushed a lot of the gems into the 21st century with new life and vigor. The "automatic game player"-coded-in-z80, i.e. hardware playing hardware, is a real hoot! And last but not least, consider this: people are still writing amazing software for the older architectures, using modern principles, and learning astonishing new things about the "antique hardware", to boot! In my particular nook I have witnessed the Oric-1/Atmos machines (http://oric.org http://oric.org), typically considered a fairly "grotty" 8bit machine of the 80's, never enough decent software, died early .. yet now come to new life with the discovery of never-considered color-modes and graphics capabilities by some of the modern scenes very elite hackers, turning their eyes to the "old" machines and producing new hits! I think a lesson in all of this is that the old machines still contain a lot of power. The robotron code could probably be refactored into something else, easily enough, if there was some intention behind doing it. There are a lot of 6809's out there, still, presumably in landfill its true, but nevertheless one could do worse than to re-discover old machines in the modern era, were one to want to sharpen ones skills ..

vidarh 13y ago
In Commodore circles the Oric machines were often derisively called "doorstops" as that was the only thing we considered them good for as kids. Of course this was without ever having used one, and was reatively mild compared to the Commodore fanboy hatred of Atari. Much less tried to exploit it to its limits like with e.g. the C64 which is in a similar situation in terms of new discoveries despite how well it was mapped out by the late 80's (I remember finally getting my hand on a copy of a hand written diagram of exactly how many bus cycles the graphics chip "stole" from the CPU under what circumstances - essential to many demo effects that even many Commodore designers insisted were impossible until they were demonstrated...) I'm not sure about 6809's, but the very similar MOS/WDC 6502 derivatives is still manufactured by Western Design Centre, founded by Bill Mensch (the co-designer of the 6502 together with Chuck Peddle, who was on the 6800 design team at Motorola for some time, though he joined after the main 6800 design was done): http://www.wdesignc.com/wdc/ http://www.wdesignc.com/wdc/

vidarh 13y ago

In Commodore circles the Oric machines were often derisively called "doorstops" as that was the only thing we considered them good for as kids. Of course this was without ever having used one, and was reatively mild compared to the Commodore fanboy hatred of Atari. Much less tried to exploit it to its limits like with e.g. the C64 which is in a similar situation in terms of new discoveries despite how well it was mapped out by the late 80's (I remember finally getting my hand on a copy of a hand written diagram of exactly how many bus cycles the graphics chip "stole" from the CPU under what circumstances - essential to many demo effects that even many Commodore designers insisted were impossible until they were demonstrated...) I'm not sure about 6809's, but the very similar MOS/WDC 6502 derivatives is still manufactured by Western Design Centre, founded by Bill Mensch (the co-designer of the 6502 together with Chuck Peddle, who was on the 6800 design team at Motorola for some time, though he joined after the main 6800 design was done): http://www.wdesignc.com/wdc/ http://www.wdesignc.com/wdc/