albaugh@dms.UUCP (Mike Albaugh) (01/18/90)
From article <4817845d.20b6d@apollo.HP.COM>, by rehrauer@apollo.HP.COM (Steve Rehrauer): > Sort of related question: whatever happened to the 6809 chip? I always > thought it had a lot going for it, too, as 8-bit chips go. The only > commercial computer/game that I know for sure used it was the Tandy Co-Co. ---- Warning: Personal (but not totally uninformed) opinion follows --- I believe Williams used them for Defender et al. We used them in a few games (Star Wars and I, Robot come to mind). A nice, easy to program, chip but the main (only ?) thing going for it was relative ease of generating not_too_bad code. The 6502 would just about always beat it in assembly if you bothered to tweak at all, and was multiply sourced (read: cheaper) and easier to interface to video memory. If you really _had_ to program in a Higher level language, you bought a 68000... (similar arguments apply to Z80 versus 6502). ---- and some further unsuported but interesting rumor --- BTW, The CoCo almost sunk I, Robot. Seems Moto promised us a slug of 6809Es (the ones you don't have to stand on your head to interface to video), then sold Radio Shack their design for the CoCo. All the sudden there are _no_ E's available, and we had to hustle to re-design for the vanilla 6809. Grrrrrr Anyway, once burned, twice shy... Mike | Mike Albaugh (albaugh@dms.UUCP || {...decwrl!pyramid!}weitek!dms!albaugh) | Atari Games Corp (Arcade Games, no relation to the makers of the ST) | 675 Sycamore Dr. Milpitas, CA 95035 voice: (408)434-1709 | The opinions expressed are my own (Boy, are they ever)