Playing Board Games with Deep Convolutional Neural Network on 8bit Motorola 6809

Posted by mci 5 hours ago

Comments

Comment by Projectiboga 1 hour ago

It was a hybrid processor, 16 on the inside 8 bit on the bus. From Wikipedia.

The Motorola 6809 ("sixty-eight-oh-nine") is an 8-bit microprocessor with some 16-bit features. It was designed by Motorola's Terry Ritter and Joel Boney and introduced in 1978. Although source compatible with the earlier Motorola 6800, the 6809 offered significant improvements over it and 8-bit contemporaries like the MOS Technology 6502, including a hardware multiplication instruction, 16-bit arithmetic, system and user stack registers allowing re-entrant code, improved interrupts, position-independent code, and an orthogonal instruction set architecture with a comprehensive set of addressing modes.

Comment by adrian_b 38 minutes ago

Motorola 6809 was a great improvement over Zilog Z80 (previously the best "8-bit" processor), but unfortunately it was introduced too late, in 1979, when the transition towards 16-bit CPUs able to address more than 64 kB of memory had already started.

Motorola had made the mistake of introducing at the same time 2 different incompatible ISAs, one for CPUs covering the low-end of the market, MC6809, and one for CPUs covering the high-end of the market, MC68000. This mistake has cost them the chance of being selected for the IBM PC (because MC68000 was considered too expensive, while MC6809 was not future-proof, with its limited addressing space). After they have seen the success of Intel with its 2 software-compatible CPUs, 8086 for the high end and 8088 for the low end, Motorola has also introduced MC68008, a MC68000 variant for cheaper computers, but it was too late, as the IBM PC became dominant.

Comment by pklausler 3 hours ago

I think of the 6809 as a 16-bit microprocessor, myself (pace Wikipedia). It has 16-bit registers, load/stores, and add/subtracts. A nice clean architecture for its day.

Comment by spogbiper 2 hours ago

I learned assembly on the 6809 and enjoyed it quite a bit. Much nicer than x86, which pretty much convinced me never to do assembly again

Comment by RandomTeaParty 1 hour ago

"Board games" here means go (and only it?)

I honestly was hoping for some tabletop eurogames or smth...

Comment by actionfromafar 58 minutes ago

... 8-bit microprocessor launched by Motorola in 1978

...reached a playing strength on par with GNU Go

Comment by adrian_b 23 minutes ago

MC6809 was actually launched in 1979, like MC68000, about one year after the launch of 8086 in 1978 by Intel.

What Motorola did in 1978 was to publish some articles in the specialized magazines, announcing MC6809 as the future better replacement for their existing MC6800 derivatives. This is the same like Intel describing during last year how great will be their Panther Lake CPU, but Panther Lake has really been launched only a couple of days ago.