7 Aug
2006
7 Aug
'06
9:37 a.m.
On Sunday 06 August 2006 10:41 pm, Ray Arachelian wrote:
Roy J. Tellason wrote:
I've heard of that one somewhere.
On Sunday 06 August 2006 06:50 pm, Ray Arachelian
wrote:
Absolutely. The 68000 is an amazing little chip when you compare it to
the 6800 and 6502's that it evolved itself from. You can sort of get a
feel from this from this journal:
http://linux.monroeccc.edu/~paulrsm/dg/dg.htm DTACK Grounded was a
Journal that was pushing a plug in board to Commodore Pet's and Apple
II's and possibly other 8 bit systems to enable a 68000 to run inside of
them. The differences between the 68K and the host they live inside of
are huge. A far cleaner approach would be to use 32 bit
registers to begin with.
Then, you're not limited to 16 bit segments, nor do you have to worry
about segments. See the 68000.
Which is exactly why I have one or two of those chips around with the
thoughts of maybe someday playing with them, a thought that I've *never*
had with regard to the x86 parts, which I'll just _use_ as a part of an
already-made system It's worth a read to get a feel of the excitement
the 68K caused back in
the day when it was introduced. Some of it is very funny, there's one
issue where the author compares an Intel FPU to the 68000 running
software floating point routines, and guess what, the 68000 actually ran
FASTER! :-)
Heh. No surprise there... I guess that elegance of hardware design does
count for something.
Sometimes I wonder how things might have been different if that chip family
had been picked instead of the intel crap for the original "PC" and had gone
on from there.
--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin