- Agreed. Yuzu emulating a currently shipping flagship platform from a historically litigious company was risky. Trying to explicitly monetize it was downright reckless.
Sadly, the inevitable response put all of retro emulation in a bad light to the general public.
- Wow, what a great find! An extensive, contemporaneous print media article on the death of the Amiga that I've never seen before. All because apparently it was never archived online before now. A physical print copy had to be dug out of the NYC library archives and scanned.
- > 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.
- The 6809 was almost certainly the ultimate 8-bit processor design since it had many 16-bit features as well as advanced addressing modes, stack handling and advanced instructions including a multiply.
The crown of "Best 8-Bit CPU" should probably go to the little known 6309 CPU, an advanced variant of the 6809 made by Hitachi under license from Motorola (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitachi_6309). It booted up fully compatible with the 6809 but could be switched to a 'native mode' where it would execute 6809 instructions 30% faster, have more registers added and a significant number of additional instructions including divide. Being fabbed in CMOS, it could also be clocked much higher than the 6809's 2 Mhz, up to 3.58 Mhz.
Anyone wanting to create "The Ultimate 8-Bit Microcomputer" from early 80s components would want to start with a 6309 as the CPU and perhaps marry it to the 9958 video display processor used in 8-bit MSX2 computers which was probably the most advanced VDP of the era since the 6847 VDP Motorola designed for the 6809 was extremely basic with no sprites or extended palette features. For sound the best 8-bit era chip would be one of the Yamaha FM chips commonly used in MSX2 machines. Unfortunately, no manufacturer ever married these components into a world-beating Ultimate 8-Bit. It would have been an amazing machine for the time and certainly held the position as top hobbyist lust-bait - at least until the arrival of the 68000-based Amiga.
- This is great! What a labor of love!
I've downloaded the PDF so I can take my time reading through it. Nothing more fun than grabbing a nice beverage and curling up with some well-explicated 6502 assembler code on a rainy day.
Back in the day I had a Tandy Color Computer. The 6809 CPU was amazing (and I learned assembler on it) but I lusted after the higher res and better colors of the C64.
- This is a great addition! Thanks!
- This paper predicts many of the design issues soon to emerge around computer graphic display architectures and suggests display list coprocessors much like those eventually used in early arcade, console and home computer hardware.
Like much of foundational computer graphics, Ivan Sutherland et al were searching for solutions to problems few others had yet realized would be problems.
- Ugh. Decaying rubberized surfaces that turn sticky are a nightmare and it goes beyond retro and vintage gear to equipment still in current use that may only be five or six years old. As of yet, I've found no way to treat or clean these surfaces once they start to go.
- Impossible to clean since the problem isn't that they're dirty, it's the rubber degrading. I've swapped out analog sticks on ps1/2 and gamecube controllers about a dozen times by now. Unfortunate thing is the build quality of most of the replacement parts I've been able to find have them turning sticky faster than the original parts.
- I was surprisingly worried when the site didn't come up. I guess that tells us how much I enjoy and look forward to my daily dose of retro!
Keep up the great work. It's much appreciated!
- > "Games for the Atari 2600 were quite constrained."
This is a vast understatement...
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.