Subj : Computer Kits To : Dr. What From : TALIADON Date : Sat Jan 08 2022 19:45:59 DW> Did you know that the Z80 processor is *still* being manufactured today? DW> You can also still get 6502 processors new as well today. DW> DW> Good designs are good designs and will stand the test of time. Both great processors for their time, but I always preferred the Z80 over the 6502 for firmware/software development. I'm not really sure why: the instruction set was dreadfully asymmetric and its timings more amenable to register operations than bus requests. It had some nice DRAM, 16-bit ALU, and indexing features, but this made the Z80 an easy chip to program and an equally difficult one to master. The Z80 was definitely a chip you learned twice: the intuitive way, and then the 'best' way. From a hardware perspective, the Z80's diverse/cycle-intensive architecture gave it a particularly 'busy' bus signature that made it difficult to integrate into uncontested designs. This little beauty just didn't want to play with its friends; it was often said that the Z80 even ate its lunch on the bus. The 6502 in contrast, with its memory-centric design and limited instruction set, offered a simpler programming paradigm and a far more amenable bus signature; if your memory logic was fast enough, designing an uncontested/interleaved system was relatively straightforward. For my money though, the 68K family sits upon its throne as the rightful king of the retro processors: large linear memory model (MMU a later option), extensive instruction set, beautifully orthogonal, tons of registers, a great bus signature, and an absolute joy to program. o-----------o------------o-------------------------o TALIADON | 2:250/6 | 21:3/138 | TALIADON-BBS@MAIL.COM | o-----------o-----------o------------o-------------------------o | "Error is a great teacher, and humility its hardest lesson." | o--------------------------------------------------------------o --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A46 2020/08/26 (Windows/32) * Origin: TALIADON BBS (21:3/138) .