Re: Not your father's Applicard

[steve.howell@altium.com.au]

6809's and 6309 were very popular with apple clones towards the end of
the Apple era. Many clones had all three processors - 6502, Z80 and
6809 on a single main board.

http://www.applelogic.org:88/AL/ACCORD.JPG


The adoptor I designed will allow as many processors you need to be
brought into an Apple II via peripheral cards, which includes
Hitachi's 63C09's and its hidden powerful instruction set.

http://www.applelogic.org/AL/6809+65C816hires.JPG


steve





On Jan 12, 9:01 pm, "Michael J. Mahon" <mjma...@aol.com> wrote:
> Steven Hirsch wrote:
> > MdntTrain wrote:
>
> >>> I'm a
> >>> software guy with enough digital hardware knowledge to be dangerous
> >>> (now,
> >>> analog audio systems are another story, but who uses them anymore?).
>
> >> Well, I do for one.  And tubes.. and vinyl... :-)
>
> > Cool.  I grew up with audio and have it in my blood.  My late father,
> > Julian Hirsch, was a well known audio reviewer and technical writer.  
> > After years of striving for the utmost accuracy in analog reproduction,
> > I think he would have found it somewhat upsetting to see devices using
> > lossy compression (e.g. iPod, MP3 players, etc.) take over so much of
> > the market.
>
> I think the market has decided that being able to carry your whole
> music library in your pocket and listen to it with "acceptable" fidelity
> anywhere is preferable to being able to listen to it with excellent
> fidelity, but only in one room of your house.
>
> IOW, good enough anywhere is "good enough"--particularly since it's
> as good as or better than most people are used to hearing anyway.
>
> Moderately good ear buds deliver pretty good dynamic range, but
> progressive hearing damage has taken much of the mass appeal out
> of "pure audio".  ;-)
>
> > I still have have about 400 vinyl LP records, although I've been
> > chipping away at transcribing them to CD (48Khz. PCM, NOT MP3
> > thankyou-very-much).  I'm one of those folks who refuses to buy
> > something twice just to have it on different media :-).
>
> My collection is similar, and I received a USB turntable as a
> present, so maybe such conversion is in my future.  Now, if I could
> just get a robot to keep putting the disks on the turntable and
> turning them over.  ;-)
>
>
>
>
>
> >>> The nice thing about Alex's upcoming FPGA project
> >>> board is that you can implement the 6809 (or, better yet, 6309) in
> >>> synthesizable logic and have enough room left over for two or three
> >>> more CPUs.
>
> >> You mean YOU could implement it.   I wouldn't have the foggiest idea
> >> of how to put a CPU core on an FPGA, much less the entire Mill card.
> >> I'd like to learn, but man, what a stretch.  My brain is back at 7400
> >> series.
>
> > Don't get me wrong!  I'm not anywhere NEAR far enough on the learning
> > curve to code a CPU in VHDL.  But, I think sewing together modules
> > written and tested by others isn't beyond my grasp.  I've been spending
> > a lot of time reading through every book I can get my hands on,
> > rewinding all the way back to the fundamentals of Karnaugh maps and
> > by-hand logic minimization.  I actually knew this stuff reasonably well
> > when I got my CS degree, but never worked in the hardware domain and it
> > sort of dissipated.
>
> It's getting harder and harder to tell the difference between a hardware
> designer and a software designer by looking over their shoulder!
>
>
>
>
>
> >> How about this idea.   If Alex introduces his FPGA kit, what about a
> >> group effort / learning project to recreate the Mill on his card?
> >> All in the group would commit to purchasing Alex's card, then we'd all
> >> help each other learn about it and make kinda like an Open Source
> >> project of getting a Mill, docs, and software all organized.   A
> >> project like this would help legacy brains like mine learn about the
> >> newer technologies.. it'd be a great thing that'd go beyond just a
> >> Mill card... especially if enough people would get on board.
>
> > I'm always up for a challenge, so why not?  The first order of business
> > is to find some architectural information on the 6809 Mill.  The second
> > is to reverse engineer the little piggy-back board that made it possible
> > to run OS-9 on the Apple.  If the implementation is anything like the
> > CoCo (a good bet), memory re-mapping is a requirement.  Everything in
> > OS-9 is fully relocatable and it dynamically maps logical <---> physical
> > address space in 4k chunks.  My CoCo has 512K installed and it's able to
> > use all of that by swapping these chunks into the 64k address space as
> > needed by the currently running task. Task switching is triggered by a
> > hardware timer interrupt.  Quite sophisticated for a little machine.
>
> > The 6809 architecture is not really very similar to the 6502, and is
> > highly optimized for relocatable, PC-relative addressing.
>
> Of course, like all 68* machines, it's big-endian, so data exchange with
> a 65* machine is a bit of a pain...
>
> -michael
>
> ******** Note new website URL ********
>
> NadaNet and AppleCrate II for Apple II parallel computing!
> Home page:  http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon/
>
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