At 18:28 -0600 11/28/07, Sean wrote:
A Color Computer or Color Computer 2 seems to fit
the bill. The CPU is
the nicest of the 8bits (IMHO) and the video screen is more logical than
anything you'll find on the C64, Atari or Apple. ...
At 18:28 -0600 11/28/07, Mark M. wrote:
I'd tend to agree. The 6809 is a lovely processor,
and there aren't any of
the "black box" chips that others have mentioned. ...
I'd agree completely, *except* that if you want to do
Assembly (conveniently), you also need the EDTASM+ ROM cartridge, and
prices/availability for those seem to have gone a little wonky in the
past 6 months. EBay prices yield systems for $5 to $10 (plus
shipping), but the EDTASM cart is over $30. I have not found a
non-eBay source that actually had a cart for sale at all.
I don't quite have the knowledge to do it, but something I'd
really like to see is a reverse-engineered equivalent (editor,
assembler, monitor) implemented and available as an inexpensive
cassette tape or downloadable sound file that could be played into
the cassette port (or even, shudder, READ-DATA/POKE basic program to
type in) and an accompanying public-domain manual. I know this would
be vulnerable to getting overwritten by an out-of-control assembly
program, and the ROM version is preferable, but it sure would turn a
cheap, otherwise very capable BASIC platform into a cheap, very
capable Assembly language platform that one occasionally had to
re-load.
I note that there are good emulators and cross-compilers
available for both Mac OS-X and Windows:
Toolshed for OS-X rocks:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/toolshed/
David Keil's Windows emulator gets excellent reviews:
http://www.discover-net.net/~dmkeil/index.htm
no relation either way.
--
- Mark, 210-379-4635
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