I'm told 65XX cores were used as the basis for several hard drive controllers of the era
Western Design Center is still (apparently) making a profit at least in part licensing 6502 core IP for embedded stuff. There's probably a 6502 buried and unrecognized in all sorts of low-cost control applications laying around you.
I dunno. The 6502 has been a $2 part for a long time but needs RAM and some glue logic, for a similar price you can get an AVR-8 [1] or ESP-32 [2] and get some RAM and GPIO.
[1] faster, more registers than the IBM 360, << 64k RAM
65C02s are $8 now. That didn't stop me buying one when I was stuck at home during COVID. And a 6809 too.
But forget AVR. Yeah, for a buck or so the ATTiny85 was my go-to small MCU five years ago, and the $5 328 for bigger tasks.
But for the last three years both can be replaced by a 48 MHz 32 bit RISC-V CH32V003 for $0.10 for the 8 pin package (like ATTiny85, and also no external components needed) and $0.20 for the 20 pin package with basically the same number of GPIOs as the 328. At 2k RAM and 16K flash it's the same RAM and a little less flash than the ATMega328 -- but not as much as you'd think as RISC-V handles 16 and 32 bit values and pointers sooo much better.
And now you have the CH32V002/4/5/6 with enhanced CPU and more RAM and/or flash -- up to 8K rAM and 62K flash on the 006 -- and still for around the $0.10-$0.20 price
Hi Bruce! If you make it back to the states we'll have to drink a beer and wax poetic about the 6809. Do you know if anyone ever implement the embedded RISC-V profile in hardware? Not everything I do on small systems needs a 48MHz 32-bit. But if I could get away with a low I/O count, why not use the $0.10 part? Also pretty sure I saw 8051 based SoCs going for $2. I bet if you looked hard enough you could find something like a 6502 for about the same price.
There's probably no reason not to get some of the CH32VXXX's to play with. Every now and again I have an application that needs very low power and I'm happy to spring for an MSP430. But every time I buy an MSP430, TI EoLs the specific model I bought.
Heeey, how's the Cruz treating you? If it still is.
I don't know why you'd ever want to pay a cent more for a 6502 or 8051 or AVR than for a RISC-V or ARM (e.g. Puya PY32F002A). Especially when the CH32V002/4/6 run on anything from 2V to 5V (plus a margin) which is pretty rare, and they don't need any external components.
I don't know whether the M6809 designers were the first to ever analyse a body of real software to find instruction and addressing mode frequencies and the distribution of immediates in order to optimise the encoding of a new ISA -- in a way that the 8086 people clearly didn't [1], but I think they were the first to publish about it, and I was fascinated by their BYTE articles at the time.
MSP430 is also a fun ISA. I just wish they were cheaper, and the cheap ones has more than 512 bytes of RAM. FRAM is funky. I also loooove the instruction encoding e.g. `add.w r10,r11` is `0x5B0A` where `5` is `add`, `B` is src register, `0` means reg to reg word size, `A` is dst register. Just beautiful. Far nicer for emulating on a 6502 or z80 than Arm or RISC-V too. The R2/R3 const generation is a bit whack though.
[1] e.g. on one hand deciding it was worth squeezing a 5 bit offset from any of 4 registers into a 2-byte instruction, while also providing 8 and 16 bit offsets with 3 and 4 byte instructions. They were also confident enough to relegate the 6800's SEC/CLC/SEI/CLI/SEV/CLV to two-byte instructions (with a mask so you could do multiple at once). But not confident enough to do the same with DAA, or SEX. They kept the M6800 encoding for DAA (and for as much else as possible e.g. keeping the opcodes for indexed addressing, but expanding from one option to dozens), but SEX was new to them and they could have experimented with it.
I actually enjoyed the series, much as I went in assuming I wouldn't. It works best if you pretend you've never seen another Alien franchise but read a summary of the first 2 movies.
I assumed this meant high school or earlier (18 and under). Most kids I grew up with (including myself) wouldn't be mature enough to do this without explicit instruction (and some policing!). That is why I want to understand more. Example: Did they have a big school meeting where they explained to local kids: "There are bunch of war refugees coming. Here are some things we can do to make them feel more welcome. First: Don't criticize their accent when they are speaking Flemish/Dutch." It is also interesting from the lens of Belgian linguistic culture, as the country is broadly divided north is Flemish, south is French and a tiny part is German.
So "not being a dick" really does need an explanatory framework in your world (and an elaborate one, with mostly irrelevant detail). That's.......a shame.
The problem here is just that upthread Muromec said “it’s that I want to gatekeep” when surely they meant “don’t,” and now there’s a whole chain of misunderstanding.
I was sold on greyscale (2-bit) on the NeXT. I ran many NCD Xterminals back in the day, and the greyscale ones were awfully nice.
I do have a radiology setup I use for writing sometimes, but yeah it's not a general purpose solution. I didn't think about it being the white point so thanks for pointing that out.
At least someone hasn't complained about it being 'unix like', always without defining what the non-unix-like OS they want would look like, or where the software to run on it would come from.
First, we could start by what UNIX authors did after they considered UNIX done, looking at Plan 9 and Inferno.
Then there are the OSes already done during the 1960 and 1970 outside Bell Labs, as possible ideas.
As from where the software would come from, if we keep recicling UNIX, we will keep getting UNIX regardless of whatever cool features the OS might offer, as most developers are lazy.
Hence why it is great that while Apple and Google OSes have some UNIX there, bare bones POSIX apps will hardly make it into the store.
Yes, I think most of us are clear that seL4 isn't Unix. But people continue to complain that anything with a Posix layer is Unix-like, and therefore somehow 'bad'. My point was that virtually everyone who complains about this never, ever explains what would have been better to implement, just that it should have been different.
Look up James Gosling and get back to us. I'd especially be interested in hearing how your undoubtedly superior experience would result in a more successful language. I'm sure you can vibe code something up.
Western Design Center is still (apparently) making a profit at least in part licensing 6502 core IP for embedded stuff. There's probably a 6502 buried and unrecognized in all sorts of low-cost control applications laying around you.
RC5 on an 8085
Oof. Well played.
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