Re: Hardware emulation of 6509 using 6502?

From: Michał Pleban <lists_at_michau.name>
Date: Tue, 06 Mar 2018 22:56:52 +0100
Message-ID: <5A9F0EA4.5000309@michau.name>
Hello!

Steve Gray wrote:

> There was a 24K ram cart for the CBM-II series. It adds 24K into bank
> 15. I wonder if the P500 could use that ram for graphics/sprites?

A good thing to check. I must pull my P500 from storage, and then I will
try the cartridge.

> IMHO, Commodore should have fully populated BANK 15 with 64K ram and
> made it possible to bank out the ROMs as the C64 does. This would have
> made the machines 100 times more useful and would have allowed large
> programs to run without all the overhead required to access kernal
> routines from other banks.

Well, as I understand the idea was to have lots of big chunks of RAM
available, and in bank 15 it's not so easy to do. Sure, you can bank out
the ROMS and I/O chips C64-style but what's the point of going through
such gymnastics when you have unrestricted access to RAM in banks 0-14?
One of the points of expanding the address space to 1 MB was to get rid
of huddling ROM and RAM in the same addresses.

What they did really mess up, in my opinion, was the ability to call
code across banks. With the 6509, it is a major pain and requires lots
of setup, overhead and careful planning and code layout. They should
have created an easy method of calling KERNAL from any bank (maybe by
creating a 6509-specific instruction?) and this would allow for easy
writing large programs utilizing several banks of memory.

Regards,
Michau.



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Received on 2018-03-06 23:04:56

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