BigDumbDinosaur wrote:
The MSX architecture may have been promising but it was hobbled by use of the Z80.
I wouldn't exactly call it "hobbled." Remember we're talking about architectures conceived in the 1978 to 1980 timeframe here.
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At the time when MSX was developed, a better processor choice might have been, assuming the Japanese wanted to stay with Zilog, the Z800.
When was that chip first released to the market? My sources suggest that its first tape appeared in 1985 timeframe, some two to three years after the Japanese started contemplating shipping MSX machines to the U.S.
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The Z800 was opcode compatible with the Z80 but could do 16 bit loads and stores,
Can you clarify this further? I distinctly remember coding in Z-80 assembly as a kid (I started at age 6!), and loading and storing BC, DE, HL, IX, and IY (and in some cases, SP) as single instructions were routine operations.
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could address 16 MB of RAM.
Considering that the average computer of the day was equipped with 4KiB of RAM, and installing 32KiB was considered a "holy sh*t" phenomenon, I doubt this would have had any kind of impact what-so-ever.
By the same logic, you could say that the 6502 hobbled the Commodore 128; they could easily have chosen to use the 65C816 which was under development at the same time (the C128 and Apple IIgs are contemporaries of each other).