20 Nov
2003
20 Nov
'03
9:07 a.m.
Tom Jennings wrote:
If I recall, performance wise they werent' bad!
They had shared
*memory*, not all that much of it and weird semaphores I think, but it
suuure beats a shared IO port or other nasty hack. Actual overlapping
IO.
Was not a version of DECMATE? ( PDP-8 ) also a CMOS PDP-8/Z80 dual machine?
It wasn't possible with MSDOS, but you could
easily queue up disk
writes/reads on hte Z80 side, and have the Z80 tell the 8086 only upon
error, etc.
I still think the 8086 needed to have the 8080 instruction set microcoded
in and better 16 bit opcode design.
Ben.