BillO wrote:
Yeah, this post might upset some, but WDC don't do a very good job of documenting or keeping their tool set current.
In fact, the situation is just pathetic. No system requirements defined, no install and initial configuration process. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Free or not, these tools are supposed to support their products, right? They should be slick, well documented and at the very least, updated to be installed and be configured on a supported operating system with guiding documentation.
It sometimes seems like WDC have given up and are just waiting for the rot to take hold. I imagine a warehouse with a single shipping employee to ship out defective W65C51S chips, yeah 'n some other stuff too...
Well, yea... that's a tough one. In some ways, I would have to say keeping a toolset current makes sense if you're supporting additional products over time. As the processors supported haven't changed, there's really nothing to add. On the other hand, providing an updated version that's designed to run on newer (current and supported) versions of Windows would be a nice plus. Personally, I'd prefer a native OSX version... but that's unlikely to ever happen.
Unfortunately, documentation has never been touted as their strong point here on the forum, and will a small team, it's one of those things that we all live with out here... and at least there's a lot of experienced folks here that have helped sort much of that out.
I don't think (nor do I have any factual data) that WDC sell a ton of chips these days, but more than likely license a softcore as IP for inclusion in other products. I probably understand the W65C51 bug issues better than most, as I figured it out initially... and actually purchased about 15+ chips and picked up a logic analyzer along the way, which I also used to work through the problem. The cold hard reality is the existing inventory of chips will likely never sell out, so the cost of replacing them isn't really going to happen. It's a shame overall, as I did do a couple SBC setups that used the 65C51, hoping for (working) WDC versions that would run at 14MHz. But I've also moved on to newer UART chips now, so it's a moot point.
I also would have liked to see the ancient 6522 serial port bug fixed, but alas... hasn't happened. Still, they make new CMOS parts for the hobby world that are reasonably priced and answer emails from private individuals. For me, I've managed to get a nice working development setup, but I've been building custom machines for decades based on my own requirements, and keep current on several OSes and certain software like VMware, which adds a lot of flexibility. It's not a perfect (dev) environment... but what really is? One thing is clear, there are a lot of choices for 6502/65816 development still available, and some folks are still looking to write another assembler, who knew.
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