From: Adam Thornton <athornton@gmail.com>
To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs@tuhs.org>
Subject: Re: [TUHS] 68k prototypes & microcode
Date: Thu, 4 Feb 2021 15:39:46 -0700 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAP2nic0AdTOedxfVE6MJf4uVRBGZrA0oaV8ejw7G2DNNWMRk8Q@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <alpine.DEB.2.21.2102041709300.23571@sd-119843.dedibox.fr>
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I'm probably Stockholm Syndrommed about 6502. It's what I grew up on, and
I still like it a great deal. Admittedly register-starved (well, unless
you consider the zero page a whole page of registers), but...simple, easy
to fit in your head, kinda wonderful.
I'd love a 64-bit 6502-alike (but I'd probably give it more than three
registers). I mean given how little silicon (or how few FPGA gates) a
reasonable version of that would take, might as well include 65C02 and
65816 cores in there too with some sort of mode-switching instruction.
Wouldn't a 6502ish with 64-bit wordsize and a 64-bit address bus be fun?
Throw in an onboard MMU and FPU too, I suppose, and then you could have a
real system on it.
32-bit SPARC was kind of fun and felt kind of like 6502. The 6502 wasn't
exactly RISCy...but when working with RISC architectures, understanding the
6502 seemed to be helpful.
I really liked the 68000, but in a different way. It's a nice, regular,
easy-to-understand instruction set without many surprises, and felt to me
like it had plenty of registers. Once the 68030 brought the MMU onboard it
was glorious.
Post-370 (which is to say 390/z IBM mainframe architectures) went wild with
microprogrammed crazy baroque very, very special purpose instructions.
Which, I mean, OK, cool, I guess, but not elegant.
I don't really know enough about the DEC architectures. It is my strong
impression that the PDP-11 is regular, simple to understand, and rather
delightful (like I find the 68000), while VAX gets super-baroque like later
IBM mainframe instruction sets. Although I've worked with emulated 10s,
11s, and VAXen, I've never really done anything in assembly (sure, you can
argue that C is the best PDP-11 preprocessor there is) on them.
On Thu, Feb 4, 2021 at 3:12 PM Steve Nickolas <usotsuki@buric.co> wrote:
> On Fri, 5 Feb 2021, Dave Horsfall wrote:
>
> > The Z80 was quite nice; I wrote heaps of programs for it, and I even
> found an
> > ANSI C Compiler for it (Hi-Tech as I recall; BDS-C was, well, you could
> > barely call it "C")[*]. I compiled a number of Unix programs...
>
> Well, it *was* "Braindead Software" C.
>
> <snip>
>
> > The x86 architecture is utterly brain-dead; I mean, what's wrong with a
> > linear address space? I think it was JohnG who said "segment registers
> > are for worms".
>
> The 65816 doesn't have the screwed-up bitshifted segment stuff but it's
> also a segmented architecture and is also braindead.
>
> And I'm a 65C02 fan.
>
> -uso.
>
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2021-02-04 22:40 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 54+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2021-01-29 10:49 [TUHS] AT&T 3B1 - Emulation available Arnold Robbins
2021-01-29 13:49 ` Ronald Natalie
2021-01-29 14:37 ` Clem Cole
2021-01-31 7:57 ` arnold
2021-01-31 8:41 ` Rich Morin
2021-02-03 7:53 ` emanuel stiebler
2021-02-03 7:59 ` arnold
2021-02-03 8:53 ` Ed Bradford
2021-02-03 8:58 ` arnold
2021-02-03 10:13 ` Ed Bradford
2021-02-03 14:58 ` Clem Cole
2021-02-03 15:33 ` Henry Bent
2021-02-03 16:53 ` Clem Cole
2021-02-04 0:41 ` [TUHS] 68k prototypes & microcode John Gilmore
2021-02-04 0:52 ` Al Kossow
2021-02-04 1:10 ` Arthur Krewat
2021-02-04 1:33 ` Larry McVoy
2021-02-04 1:47 ` Al Kossow
2021-02-04 1:57 ` Al Kossow
2021-02-04 7:23 ` Arno Griffioen
2021-02-04 11:28 ` Toby Thain
2021-02-04 15:47 ` Arthur Krewat
2021-02-04 16:03 ` emanuel stiebler
2021-02-04 21:55 ` Dave Horsfall
2021-02-04 22:11 ` Steve Nickolas
2021-02-04 22:39 ` Adam Thornton [this message]
2021-02-04 22:47 ` Henry Bent
2021-02-05 14:42 ` Michael Parson
2021-02-04 22:56 ` Richard Salz
2021-02-04 23:14 ` Steve Nickolas
2021-02-04 1:35 ` Clem Cole
2021-02-04 2:18 ` Dave Horsfall
2021-02-04 15:53 ` Arthur Krewat
2021-02-05 2:16 ` Dave Horsfall
2021-02-05 2:53 ` Larry McVoy
2021-02-04 1:14 ` Clem Cole
2021-02-04 1:20 ` Clem Cole
2021-02-04 14:56 ` John Cowan
2021-02-03 15:20 ` [TUHS] AT&T 3B1 - Emulation available emanuel stiebler
2021-02-03 16:48 ` Doug McIntyre
2021-02-03 10:46 ` emanuel stiebler
2021-02-03 11:13 ` arnold
2021-02-05 12:44 ` Sergio Pedraja
2021-02-07 7:32 ` arnold
2021-02-17 16:07 ` emanuel stiebler
2021-02-17 22:00 ` Ed Carp
2021-02-17 22:14 ` Larry McVoy
2021-02-18 1:30 ` Ed Carp
2021-02-18 7:59 ` arnold
2021-02-18 18:07 ` Brad Spencer
2021-02-13 1:06 [TUHS] 68k prototypes & microcode Jason Stevens
2021-02-13 2:30 ` Gregg Levine
2021-02-13 4:34 Jason Stevens
2021-02-13 6:05 ` Toby Thain
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