Me: 6502 is a pain, it adds some spurious memory reads, it must be used with care when operating on addresses where reads have side effects. That makes NES programming a pain. I prefer 68000 for that, it doesn't have any of those glitches.
Me: 68000 has a spurious memory read on its CLR instruction. ACIA 6850 has side-effects on reading its data register.
Data-East/Sega Version 3B platform is an interesting beast. When Data-East first came up with a pinball machine that had a dot matrix display, their approach was to make the display board an autonomous thing that just listened for commands from the CPU board. All the animations and stuff are run locally.
The original one had a 6809 on it like the main CPU board has too, but when they went from 128x16 and 128x32 displays to the huge 192x64, they needed a bit more muscle to handle it.
So the new version of the display board runs with a 68000. In a lot of animations the difference is pretty noticeable with the huge framerate increase and all kinds of creative transitions between the animations.
4 games were released with this platform: Maverick, Frankenstein, Batman Forever and Baywatch. It was in production for less than a year, from fall 1994 to summer 1995.
After that Sega downgraded back to 128x32 displays and a 6809 CPU.
Does anyone know the compression algorithm that was used in Connectix RAM Doubler which was available for Classic MacOS in the 1990s – or, this would be even better, was the software ever reverse engineered or open sourced?
Since Mavericks (10.9), modern Mach-based OS X/macOS uses the WKdm algorithm for memory compression, so it would be interesting to see if this was already used back then.
Sean Haas of @adventofcomputing has a fascinating episode out about #IDRIS, a reimplementation of #UNIX for a variety of early personal computers with #Intel8086, #Motorola68000 CPUs as well as #DEC #PDP11. Bizarrely, the OS seems mostly lost.
adventofcomputing: Episode 149 - IDRIS is Not UNIX
https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-149-is-119316624
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idris_(operating_system)
A version of IDRIS that starts from #DOS is available on GitHub, though!
https://github.com/hansake/Whitesmiths-Idris-OS/tree/main/co-idris_setup
Today is Motorola's birthday. Motorola doesn't make CPUs anymore, but its CPUs powered many great retro computers, and they had many more CPUs in their line than just the 68000 and the PowerPC. #retrocomputing #motorola #Motorola68000 https://dfarq.homeip.net/motorola-born-on-this-day-in-1928/
DIL test clips are hard to find... I got lucky and even was able to get a 64 pin clip for the Lisa's 68000 CPU
#AppleLisaClone #retrocomputing #motorola68000
And we can't forget about #Motorola68000 processor, it will remain in history forever, it was used on everything!
even on the Macintosh 128K, it was everywhere!
Dan Kramer's Atari Engineering Notebook
Some of the Projects:
#AtariTrakBall
#AtariCosmos
#AtariCindy
#Atari2600BStarChip
#CIC006decoderchip
#Atari2600Ajailhouseeffect
#AtariPAM
#Atari5200
#Atari5200trackball
#MotorolaMC68000
#Motorola68000
#Atari2200
#Atari2900
#6507chip
#AtariVCSTrakball
#WicoCommandControltrackball
#SynertekSY6500chip
#6502chip
https://archive.org/details/dan-kramer-atari-engineering-notebook/page/n47/mode/2up
