knudsen (05/09/83)
Richard, you would be happy with a Radio Shack Color Computer. The basic 16K machine is on sale now for $199, and the plug-in ROM editor/assembler/very-nice-debugger is $49 list. The Color is one of the few home machines that works very reliably with a plain cassette recorder (Ataris and Commodores don't). A strong point of this machine is its Motorola 6809 processor, which combines the simplicity of programming of the 6502 with the large number of registers found in the Z80. It supports much more advanced programming techniques than other 8-bit micros (position-independent code, stack frames, full indirect addressing), yet is easy to program and you can ignore all those nice features until you get used to them. Plus it has an 8x8 hardware multiply (12 microseconds)! After years of 6502 frustrations (you won't belive the instructions they left out of the 6502) and terror at contemplating the multiple, un-orthogonal, no-two-alike registers of the Z80, I find the 6809 to be a very powerful but easy-to-remember architecture for Assembler work, which you plan to do. Of course the Color uses any TV set. Two guys named Inman wrote a great book on assembler graphics for the Color (actually a general assembler book using graphics and sound as motivations). BTW, I don't use the Shack's assembler; I have The Micro Works' SDS80C version, which is a better editor and assembler but not quite as good a debugger (no single-step or disassembly). This is the last time I will plug the Color Computer on Netnews. I'm getting kicked off our netnews machine here, so I guess I'll miss the next great micro from Nat Semi, etc etc. It's been great. My new mail address will be ihivs!knudsen, not ihnss; that should still work. 73, mike k