knudsen@ihnss.UUCP (10/24/84)
<bit bucket> This is for anyone whose 6809 system includes the 6883 SAM chip, such as found in CoCos. Anyone know the purpose/function of the internal ROM's bytes from about $FFE0 (sorry, I'm at work and Coco is at home) thru $FFF1? The data are definitely read-only, but don't seem to make any sense either as 6809 opcodes or as address vectors. The Motorola books refer to them as "reserved for system use" (which covers everything above $FF60, and we all ignore that, don't we), BUT one footnote implies they may be a disk boot, like for a DOS. Now wouldn't that be nice... but it sure doesn't look like 6809 code to me. I wonder if we all even have the same data in those bytes. Could they be a version or even serial number? Imagine, copy-protecting software by having it check the SAM serial #. If anyone acts interested, I'll post my SAM's values when I get home. --mike k.