On 3 Aug 2007 at 0:47, Roy J. Tellason wrote: At one time or another, cross-assemblers in FORTRAN were coded up for most of the early 8-bit chips. I believe that Intel even offered one as a standard product at one time. GI certainly did--I have it mentioned in their product brochure. The real problem would be locating one of these. In all likelihood, one last saw existence as a stretch of 9-track 1/2" tape. Cheers, Chuck

On 03/08/07, woodelf <bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca> wrote: Check out www.6502.org for general 6502 (and successors) resources including a good forum. I'm sure there are cross assemblers for linux linked from the software/tools section. -- Pete Edwards "Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future" - Niels Bohr

On 3 Aug 2007 at 18:35, Dave McGuire wrote: I think I have a few of the Avocet cross-assemblers. For projects of any size, however, it's best that you have not only a cross-assembler that outputs relocatable code, but a linker/loader to handle the job of resolving inter-module references and performing relocation. Cheers, Chuck

There's an experience gained by building it yourself that simply can't be obtained by playing with an emulator. Building a real/physical computer is a worthwhile excercise and beneficial learning experience. Besides, friends and family are much less impressed by a wave of the hand at a PC running an emulator with the statement "I downloaded that!" then they are by a rats nest of wires, circuit boards, cables and such and "I built it myself!" I can help in this area... I've been doing development tools for embedded systems since the 70's, and I've got assemblers, disassemblers, debuggers/monitors and in most cases C compilers for many different 8 and 16-bit CPU families. Another plug for my CUBIX system: The system comes with the following resident (runs on CUBIX itself) development tools: 6809 Assembler ASP - A simple high-level language/preprocessor for the assembler. Debugger (breakpoints, single-step, disassembler, all the usual commands etc.) Basic Forth Micro-APL C compiler 8080 simulator Text editors / utilities / etc. - Source is posted for all of the above except for the C compiler. I can also provide PC based cross development tools for the 6809 including: Hardware Debug Monitor (RAMless - needs only ROM to run) Full-up ROMable 6809 monitor (Quite powerful) 6809 Assembler 6809 Disassembler (Does symbols, memory block types, comments etc.) 6809 C compiler 6809/CUBIX simulator/emulator - Lets you run 6809 code on your PC with ICE type debugging capabilities - Also boots CUBIX, provides access to all the resident tools etc. I'm obviously biased, but I think it's a worthwhile system to build. Depending on your skill/experience/time available, it should take anywhere from a day or two to a few weeks to build it. What you get from the excercise is a unique system that can actually do useful things, and the experience and satisfaction of having created it with your own two hands. Having built it yourself, along with the fact that I have released the source code means that you have the opportunity to fully understand EVERYTHING about this system - down to the tiniest wire, and the last byte of code - this is something that rarely happens with modern computers. This system is simple enough that you shouldn't have trouble following the design, yet powerful enough to be considered a "real" computer. As noted in previous message, a functional CUBIX system including disk controller and serial console can be built with less than two-dozen chips (My schematic shows 26 ICs, however thats with two serial ports (with level convertors), and multiple 6264 8K RAMs - Use of a bigger SRAM and 1 serial would drop 1/2 dozen ICs or more). The trickiest part to find are the 6809 CPU, and the integrated FD data eparator that I used. 809 can be found if you look around (Hitachi 6309 can also be used), and if you can't find a 9216, you can use the design from the WD databook - a few more chips, but not many. CUBIX itself occupies an 8K ROM - so you will need to get an EPROM programmed. Once you have this, you can bootstrap the system/utilities disks by either creating them with ImageDisk, or formatting a blank under CUBIX and uploading each file serially and saving it to disk (this is how I used to create CUBIX masters). If you like, you can build the system in stages - All you need at first the CPU, some memory and at least one serial port - very simple to build. Drop in my MON09 monitor and you have a very capable single-board computer. You can cross develop software on the PC, download it through the serial port and run/debug it with a pretty decent debugger. When you are ready, flesh out the memory and add the disk controller, swap to the CUBIX ROM and you have a fully functioning disk based system. I should also point out that unlike most home-grown designs, the CUBIX system is very well documented. Two of the three 360k diskettes that normally accompany the system are filled with documentation. Over a dozen documents containing more than 300 pages. What else can I say - all of the CUBIX material is available free on my site. If people are interested, I could organize it into a separate "building a CUBIX system" page with more information, additional PC tools and other related material. Let me know if there is any interest. Dave -- dave06a (at) Dave Dunfield dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com com Collector of vintage computing equipment: http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/index.html

Ok - I'm terribly busy at the moment, but over the next few months I'll try and organize some material for a "build your own classic computer" section on my site. The number of people who express interest will determine to some extent how agressively I try and make time for it... There's a few changes I should probably make to the design as well. It was originally designed with a 74138 as the primary memory decoder with an 8K (2764) EPROM at the top, 8K of I/O space at the bottom, and 6 6264 8K SRAM chips for 48k of main memory. Nowadays it would make more sense to use bigger SRAMs (at least 32k) and moving the I/O to the top would simplify decoding. I could also shrink the area reserved for I/O and increase system memory. Probably also time to update the design to use a 3.5" diskette drive. Dave -- dave06a (at) Dave Dunfield dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com com Collector of vintage computing equipment: http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/index.html

Tony Duell wrote: But on this list you get but find out other machines than the standard 8080/Z80 6502/6800 crop of cpu chips. Since you can't find the chips any more from other less common computer systems I don't expect the software is out there at all. Ben alias woodelf. PS. (wish list)Can the Cubix 6809 system run the open source of OS/9? That would make a nice homebrew with a small IDE drive.