- Dammit! What a horrible decision. Man, who doesn't get when Jason Scott entrusts something to you, he means it and believes you do too.
- I upgraded mine too!
48K Atari 400 with real keys!
At school, I was banging around on the Apple 2 computers, and working my 400 at home.
Damn good times!
- bmonkey325 509 days agoThe Inhome B key kit was the kit of choice.
- ddingus 503 days agoRight on
- Same.
I love making things work. Old things are the best especially when I end up with a legit use case.
- Yeah, ugly time for sure!
SGI was another casualty, though it was PCs running Linux that did it.
A lot of digital effects were done on IRIX. And like Amiga groups, the studios experienced serious price pressure and in a rare move, developed open tools together, then shared them to bootstrap onto Linux.
Amiga computers were not always replaced with Windows.
- I always felt like Windows NT and its graphics stack did more to kill off professional users of SGI. 3DS/3DS Max and special codes like SoftImage running on wintel was easy to setup and operate in tv/movie . Each generation of nvidia and intel cpu gave more bang back for the buck for your $200/hr artists and engineers.
- You are not wrong. The knife blade used was the Sgi and Microsoft Fahrenheit Project.
Microsoft mooched the shit out of SGI tech, while largely doing as little as possible to help the SGI NT computers succeed.
The big players were on IRIX. Win NT ports of stuff like Maya brought in cheap fast workstations. But, the tooling was crap and a lot of that Win NT share ended up on Linux, not back on IRIX.
- From anecdotes from friends modern Pixar is driven entirely by Python
- They also made a 6809 model that ran FLEX from Moto as well as an SWTP environment I cannot recall right now.
This era of machines makes me want to get a nice terminal.
- This podcast is great! I have listened to almost every show. Perfect drive time listening.
- I don't know about the best, but to me it is the most beautiful!
And with well conceived video hardware, the 6809 could do a lot!
The arcade game DEFENDER is a single, pixel pushing 6809 drawing to a single frame buffer. Notably, that hardware included a signal when the CRT raster hit the middle of the screen!
This made a single bitmap frame buffer function as a double buffered display, without the cost of having to clear an entire screen in between frames.
Very efficient.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wAKxa5C9jHY&t=3122s&pp...
You can skip through that to find some of the real action. Quite impressive!
Notably, a 6800 does the sound. One sound at a time generated parametically.
There have been some experiments to drop a 6809 into other 8 bit systems. One was created for the Atari, but no real software pushing limits was ever created.
I would think one of the better transplants would be the Apple 2. It has a video system that does not interrupt the CPU. That would operate much like the Williams hardware, minus the handy screen addressing.
The 6809 is my favorite 8 bit CPU.
While I have not programmed a 6309, I would enjoy it immensely.
Maybe I can stick one onto a card in my Apple one day.
- > I don't know about the best, but to me it is the most beautiful!
Since I was a relatively impoverished college student and had no prior experience with computers when I got my first, a 4k 6809-based Tandy Color Computer, I learned Coco BASIC and then 6809 assembly language (using Radio Shack's ROM cartridge-based Assembler/Editor), I had no inkling how spoiled I was. The Coco's Extended Color BASIC was quite advanced for the time (as compared to the stock ROM BASIC's on comparable micros) and the 6809's ISA was leagues ahead of the 6502 and Z80. I had no idea until much later (post 8-bit era) how relatively primitive the ISAs were on the 6809's 8-bit peers. Since it was all I knew, indexed and program-counter relative addressing just seemed like the obvious natural way of things.
I also didn't understand what was meant by "orthogonal instruction set" when I read the term in Osborne's 6809 book. I just thought every instruction and addressing mode for each register and stack pointer would always have a complete set of its logically-implied counterparts in all CPUs! :-) Oblivious to how fortunate I was in these ways left me feeling especially jealous of the dedicated graphics and sound hardware of the Atari and Commodore 8-bits.
Learning on the 6809's advanced architecture along with the multi-tasking, multi-user, UNIX-like OS-9 operating it enabled, left me uniquely well-prepared for the future of computing in ways other popular 8-bit micros couldn't and I never even appreciated it at the time.
- Yeah, the Moto VDA was crappy! 256x192 with some odd color and semi-graphics was not exactly brilliant.
The CoCo 3 ended up being a pretty great machine, but too late.
I had a bit of a blast programming that one briefly in one byte per pixel mode! On NTSC models, one can set the 640 pixel, 4 color mode or 320 pixel, 16 color modes and use a composite display to get basically 256 artifact colors!
I had only a cassette and limited time. All I managed to do was some nice fractal plots, and the like in assembly language.
Today, we have a fair number of good productions on that machine, though surprisingly few make use of the excellent composite modes.
Yeah, the whole setup, if one had it, really was a great education.
- The 6809 was similar having basically 16bit registers, with an 8 bit data bus, and 8 bit ALU.
Nobody said that chip was 16 bit.
In my peer group, the 68k was "Moto style 16 bit" and that generally refers to how Motorola tended toward bigger registers running on top of a smaller core architecture.
That all said, a word in Moto land is 16 bits, not 32.
32 is a long word.
This is true for many 8 and 16 bit devices and I always thought the Jaguar advocates were way off base with that argument.
Anyone remember rec.games.video.advocacy?
Man, Jaguar vs 3DO was epic! As were many other long running discussions.
I like the machine and itbsoes have a 64bit path from DSP to RAM at least.
- I have one of these. Great little computers!
Back in the 80's, I wanted one of these computers to write and carry around manufacturing related programs. Was too much money, so I settled on the PC-6. Pocket computer with 2K RAM, just enough!
I would have done more with the Model 100!
There is a 64 character driver floating around that I have lost track of. If you find it, it makes the display more dense, better.
- Those displays are great!
I ended up with a PVM to get similar quality.
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