Commie wrote:
Hi Garth,
I have kb9 up and running which I can use for calculating electrical data, there's no problem there but the problem I see is not a hardware problem, it's software.Coding in assembler is like designing a 4 layer pcb board, after a few hours it totally drains me of energy. Sure I can build a 65816 SBC based on the latest chips but what about the software? what am I going to fill it with?
All the more reason I need to get my '816 Forth cleaned up and ready for publication. I would like to port it to an available SBC also, so the newbie can have something that works immediately, right out of the box. When I developed my system years ago, an old boss took a look at it. He had moved on to another company and they had just spent $8,000 on a C development system for Motorola microcontrollers, and he admitted they did not have nearly the interactivenss and freedom I had with my simple Forth system. I do see the 6502/816 community very slowly becoming stronger and more cohesive over the years. There's a much greater inventory of professionalism on 6502.org today than there was five or ten years ago. I wish it were developing faster, but it is going in a good direction.
Quote:
Just to make a comparison, I'm also using AVR chips coupled with Bascom AVR, the latter supports single and double 64 bit floating point with transcandential math functions and it can be had for less than £100.Whether you use them in your application is up to you they are nice to have on hand.
In my opinion, if the 6502 is going to compete or stay alive then really it needs a supporting powerful compiler.
Yes I know, wdc sell one for $400.00 but I bet you it only supports WDC's 6502 chips, i.e.' it probably wouldn't work with Rockwell parts or any other 6502 for that matter.
WDC's have been the only ones in production for many years (most of them being made by licensees, not WDC itself), and the production volumes are in the
hundreds of millions of units per year, although rather invisible as they go into things like engine controls instead of desktop computers. WDC used to charge an arm and a leg for the programming manual, but in recent years has been
free online. Hopefully they will do the same with the compilers. I can see where a company might not really want to support hobbyists (I definitely see this at the electronics industry trade shows) because it can turn into a lot of hand-holding with no significant immediate sales; but if they can afford to do it, I think it is a good investment, because later on, some of those hobbyists will end up using what they know in their jobs, designing the processor into products. The added popularity of the processor also improves the general support for it.
In 1987 I wrote a small set of 7-digit decimal floating-point functions in 6502 assembly for a product at work. What a lot of clock cycles it took! A couple of years later I was introduced to fixed-point and scaled-integer math, how you typically use 16-bit cells (sometimes with 32-bit intermediate results) on 8-bit computers, and scale the needed range of numbers to what the cells can handle. At first I was very skeptical; but eventually I came to
prefer it (in systems with no floating-point coprocessor). I guess I should post 6502 & '816 routines for the transcendental math functions. They should also go in the
6502.org wiki. (Actually you could probably get them for 6502 in Lee's EhBASIC, even if you didn't want to use the BASIC itself which is, BTW, a very, very good one.) I started heading toward even the transcendental functions in the
primer on multiple-precision, scaled-integer, and fixed-point math, and was delinquent in getting very far; but got a lot of the concepts in later in the article on
large look-up tables for hyperfast, accurate, 16-bit fixed-point/scaled-integer math. Since that was about looking them up in a couple of microseconds though, it did not get into
calculating them which would be much slower.
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I can go six to eight hours writing assembly language software and not feel tired, let alone "drained."
It makes sense if you're on a tight budget, like Dajgoro was talking about. I probably have 100-200 Rockwell 65c02's, but they're only a fraction as fast as WDC's. I also have 110 NMOS 6512's which I should probably eBay because I definitely won't ever use them. I got them from Jameco on closeout in the late 1980's for a project I never went through with.