#6809
12 messages in this thread
Wow, you're still playing with 6809s?
Still playing with 6809's? Uh, yes. 🙂 They're fun. Why?
–Ben
…via AutoPilot
Are you just tinkering with them, or are you making hi-tech toys, or both? I
saw a PDP/11 emulator on the Net, if you want it. 🙂
Well, it's tinkering, really… the things I've made don't really have a
market… for instance, a fuzzy rock-saw advance based on clarity of exit spray
from the cut in the rock, my train set controller, and a couple of HAM
projects.
A PDP-11 emulator? Uh, no. 🙂 But thanks anyway.
–Ben
…via AutoPilot
What the hell is the point of a PDP/11 emulator? The idea is to get a manly ig
ungodly model so that you have to wire your house with 3-phase and can t rn off
your heating system throughought the winter.
I only had a tiny PDP/11, and I gave it to Randell for his basement museum.
I've got a Terak, an 11/03-based system, as well as a DEC Pro 350, a J-11 VAX
chip system, among others in the basement computer museum. I've been chatting
with a guy who's got a Rainbow for sale, except it would cost about $60 to
ship, and he wanted $30 for it, and I'm not sure it's worth it, unless I can
start charging admission. 🙂
This PDP emulator sounds like fun, actually. Run all those nifty programs we
used to run in a DOS window under WinNT. 🙂 As for excess heat, I have an SGI
Indigo for that. I know that I can turn the heat down with impunity when I
leave it on overnight.
I guess that's true. A PDP is like a boiler. My SparcStation is like a cer
mic furnace. 🙂
The company I work for still makes and ships embedded products with
6809's (the Hitachi 3 Mhz CMOS version) in them. Source is several
hundred pages of assembler code… Fun stuff.
The 6809 is the best 8-bit micro I've ever been exposed to. Got all
those fancy addressing modes us asm programmers love (and high level
types sniff at as "useless" because compiler writers write compilers
too dimwitted to make good use of them. Enter RISC. 🙂
Are you aware that the Hitachi 6309 (CMOS 3 Mhz 6809) has a bunch of
un-documented new and nifty features? Things like trapping illegal
opcodes, more 16-bit registers, and a few more cool things that I
can't remember at the moment. We tried them and they seem to work.
The story we got is that Hitachi implemented the features and
documented them in Japan but never released any info in the states
due to some issue with Motorola.
Yep, I've got a long file that describes the "features".
I do a lot of my 6809 work in emulation, on the Amiga, under Flex.
Using the a4000, it's all very reasonable to go about. It's not even
too bad on the 2500/030, but it's hard to go slower than you know you
can, if you follow me.
It's nice to be able to emulate any hardware you want for testing
purposes, even to the point of graphing the output and using virtual
sensors for input… that's how I tested the saw design.
Sounds neat. Our stuff is real-time multiple processor stuff so we
have to debug in real time using the real hardware. We've got a few
Applied Microsystems 6809 emulators around and we manage to keep them
running without any help from Applied Microsystems who dropped
support for them long ago.
Now we're working on stuff that runs on PCs so we're using C/C++
under OS/2 for now. Some folks don't like the switch until I point
out that they are more marketable.