Other instruction sets

[thejpster]

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CPU emulators take up some code space, why don't we pack a whole bunch into the ROM, allowing the user to upload code for any of them:

• 6502 / 6510
• Z80
• 6809

This means applications loaded into RAM can be smaller, and pure target machinecode without bundling an assembler. We would need some sort of linker script though, do determine which regions of the 24 KiB application RAM are mapped to which regions of 64 KiB 8-bit address space, and also to standardise where the emulated peripherals (screen, input, serial, etc) appear in 8-bit address space. You'd also need an 8-bit monitor.

[thejpster]

Turns out MS-DOS needs a minimum of 32 KiB of RAM to boot from floppy, so x86 isn't worth it :(

[thejpster]

CP/M has a minimum of 16 KiB. Then I could run Wordstar and Turbo Pascal :)

Edit: OK, maybe not Turbo Pascal. That needs 64 KiB.