On , Kurt Kuzba (1:154/750@fidonet) wrote: 
 RS> I'm not surprised. If anyone had ever made embedded Ami controllers, I'd
 RS> be using one.
 > Just out of curiosity, are there many embedded controllers based on the
 > 6502/6510 processors? I enjoyed the simplicity of the instruction set on
 > those, and find the x86 series to be unnecessarily complicated to maintain
 > legacy code.
Kurt...
  There were a few, but I made quite a comfortable living for a number of 
years by embedding Apple II motherboards. Some of the places I put them were 
in a pipe inspection system (for oil drilling pipe), various pieces of 
dedicated production test equipment, and a even a fetal ultrasound monitoring 
system. Unfortunately for this conversation, I programmed them all in 6502 
assembly.
 > The C compilers for the 6510, such as the Commodore 64 seemed to compile 
o
 > a very compact and well ordered form, along with having a less obstructed
 > instruction set to work with in the first place. The Commodore magazines
 > all said that C was the wave of the future. Who knew? They're all gone and
 > C is just taking center stage. :)
  Ah, speak of topicality and there it is! ;-) At the time I worked with 
them, the only native code compilers were Orca/C and Aztec C/65. I had Aztec 
since it was cheaper, but never seriously used it in any of my jobs. What I 
did use was a great little compiler for old Apple integer basic, which I 
hand-tweaked using the intermediate assembly.
  The biggest problem inherent in 6502 C compilers was the 256-byte stack. It 
was usually impractical to use it as the program stack, in which case, 
another stack had to be implemented somewhere else in software. Later 
variants of the 6502 (e.g. the 65816) overcame this problem, but by then the 
chip had been eclipsed by other designs.
 > Maybe they'll make a 64-bit system with a simple IS and scrap all the old
 > code and start fresh. Rumors exist.
  Who knows? The next generation Intel/HP chip (Merced) will finally abandon 
the x86 architecture, although it will continue to support it in software 
emulation. Although all I know about it comes from confidential sources with 
signed NDA's, one good indicator is to look at HP's PA-RISC chips of this 
decade, which are actually quite nice. The PA-RISC and MIPS architectures are 
among my favorites in current technology. Of the technologies available at 
the time of the original IBM-PC design, the NSC 16xxx and 32xxx architechture 
was also quite nice - regular and orthogonal, even better than the 68xxx 
series. Of course, it had the handicap of being a NSC product and, as Jon 
Guthrie once said, " When it comes to CPU's, National Semiconductor couldn't 
sell everlasting life!" 
--- QM v1.00
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