floobydust wrote:
I would also second BDD's suggestion on using programmable logic, as it will simplify the overall design, eliminate 2 or more chips and give you a much more flexible solution that can be easily changed.
I would like to see this amazing quantum glue logic that can be implemented with *
zero or fewer* chips! Your kung fu must indeed be powerful. Maybe we can sell the chips generated by the "or fewer" version and make a profit. (Or maybe that's where all those sketchy Ali Express logic ICs already come from!)
GARTHWILSON wrote:
You could go further and merge ZP and page 1, by making it so if A9...A15 are all 0's, A8 gets ignored and also replaced with a 0, so $100-$1FF becomes a duplicate of 00-$FF, making the hardware stack addressable in page 0 also, opening up ZP addressing modes for it. Then you could, for example, use TSX, ADC(5,X) to add the contents of an address pointed to by a byte pair in a stack frame passed to the currently executing subroutine. There would be no hard boundary between ZP and page 1; so for example if your I/O takes 00-$3F, and you know that your hardware stack needs will be adequately met with $30 bytes (addresses $1D0 to $1FF, now same as $D0 to $FF), it would leave you with $90 bytes of normal usable ZP space, ie, more than half a page.
I will have to think about this for a while to really get a grasp of how to do it, but I think it sounds amazingly cool.
GARTHWILSON wrote:
Can you explain your intention regarding the A7...A14 to the right of the B inputs of the '688.
Each Q input is pulled low through resistors, by default. You can use a jumper to short it either to VCC (to move the window around in address space), or to the corresponding P input address line so that P=Q will always be true for that line, effectively shrinking the width of the comparator. The notion is that you can double the size of the window each time you de-activate the next low-order bit.
I suppose you might be able to do interesting things by removing random upper address lines from the mix, but I can't visualize what would happen; I think it would start mirroring the window, wouldn't it?
Edit:
GARTHWILSON wrote:
Note however that the '521 is the same thing as the '688 and is available in faster variations.
BTW, I did read that in the Primer, and I looked for them when I went "comparator shopping." HC and AHC don't seem to exist on Mouser / Digikey, and AC is listed as "obsolete, non stocked" on Digikey. I see now they have them in F and ALS. I am uncertain about mixing logic families.