I was told many years ago that Am9511 was easily interfaced to Z80 but a dog wrt. 6502. It was possible and I knew someone who did it, using rather a lot of interfacing chips but it was considered painful and expensive.
I came across an image which makes it look easy: an expansion card for an AppleII which apparently could have been even simpler:
The product is from 1983, comes with a Forth and proclaims 100x faster floating point. There's more here including followup on Garth's spotting of a similar offering announced in 1980:
Quote:
Regarding speed of the Apple II: There was a Forth engine plug-in board that would have been cool to try. I was looking at a programming magazine from 1982 and came across an ad for MicroSpeed for the Apple II. At the top it says in big letters, "TEST-FLY A $20 MILLION JET ON AN APPLE? YES. WITH MICROSPEED."
Hm, 16 posts about 6502 designs using TI chips and not a single one mentions VTech? In about 1981, they released a console/computer called CreatiVision, which features a 2 MHz 6502 with 1K system RAM, a TMS9918/28 with 16K VDP RAM and a SN76489, so pretty much a 6502 equivalent of the ColecoVision console. The system had a built-in touch type keyboard, and could be expanded with a better, moving key keyboard, tape recorder, parallel interface for connecting a printer, memory expansion etc. VTech had big plans about this system.
It was mainly sold in Australia (rebadged as Dick Smith Wizzard) and throughout European markets, some systems also in South Africa and there is a very rare Japanese edition too. VTech brought the CreatiVision to CES 1983 and got very good press from major home computer magazines, but apparently it never really got launched in the US which is a shame because technically it should be more than equal to the ColecoVision.
Eventually VTech repackaged the technology as the Laser 2001 home computer, which is even more rare to find. It has more CPU RAM, real keyboard, expansions including floppy drives but in 1984 the market was rather saturated for oddball computers. Finnish company Salora however on license sold this computer as Salora Manager in a different colour scheme, but otherwise identical content, which is why you may find slighly more machines in Finland than elsewhere.
There may have been other similar designs, but VTech combined with the Apple II boards mentioned above tend to be the best known.
Wow this had gone totally out of my memory - have read about Creativision and looked like a great idea to allow the joysticks to act as a keyboard.
Considering when it was released (1981?) this is pretty advanced hardware. I think at 2MHz the 6502A is probably the fastest I know about, except for the BBC Microcomputer, which also ran at 2MHz. Compare that with C64 (just under 1MHz) and even Atari 800 (just under 1.8Mhz).
