I hadn't made the connection before

[dwight]

Such things were often done on loyalty to previous companies.

It is like the Video Brain used the F8 or that Olivetti used the Z8000 for the M20.

The Video Brain was because the designer had worked on the F8 at Fairchild.

The M20 was because Faggin was Italian and had connections to Olivetti.

Such things were not always done because they were better or cheaper.

Woz was rare in his way of thinking at the time. He was mostly looking for cheap

but having a rich set of addressing mode was surely a plus.

Dwight


________________________________
From: cctalk <cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org> on behalf of Cameron Kaiser via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Friday, June 2, 2017 9:37:13 AM
To: cclist at sydex.com; cctalk at classiccmp.org
Subject: Re: I hadn't made the connection before

> I sold a bare CP1600 chip about a year ago to a collector.   "Odd" is an
> understatement. A 10-bit wide instruction word, with the upper 6 bits of
> the opcode unused.   Loading a 16-bit address took three words.
>
> Also, slow, very slow, with no I/O instructions.

But that was because it has memory-mapped I/O, no? On the other hand the
decles were weird and it has a lot of instructions that were removed.

Retrospectively a 6502 or a Z80 would have looked like a better choice in
this application, even considering this was supposed to be a higher-end
console.

--
------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ --
  Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com<http://www.floodgap.com> * ckaiser at floodgap.com
-- Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. -- 1 Corinthians 8:1 ---------------