[Coco] 6309 microproccessor project

John Collyer johncollyer at zoominternet.net
Sat Oct 11 13:18:00 EDT 2003


This is for the new Coco List:

Hello,

I have made some headway on the project. For the 6309 Instruction Set Interpreter, I decided to go with pure assembly language. I figured why not use a good thing. I have the 6309 Instruction Set Interpreter almost ready except for some minor
stuff. It's in 32 Bit assembly language, it is fast, real fast, and it has a new feature.

The new feature is context switches. Context switches are when you switch between microprocessors. You can have four contexts and switch between them by using the enhanced instructions. The enhanced instructions allow you to create a context, delete a context, set the context, and get current context. I put these instructions at $11F2, $11F3, $11F4,
and $11F5.

Plus I'm considering not only letting you switch processor contexts, but also switching the processors 64K address space too. Switching contexts involves just saving all the processors registers and state, which should be fairly fast, but switching the
processors address space might take a little more time, however with the fast speeds of the newer Intel processors 64K
memory transfers should be pretty darn quick.

The enhanced instruction  $11FD will not work as expected anymore. This means there is no MSDOS interrupts to call anymore, but I am working on a interface to this enhanced instruction that'll let you call win32 kernel functions; such as OpenFile, ReadFile, WriteFile, SeekFilePointer, and CloseFile. Please note. If any code written depends on this enhanced instruction it will fail.

The enhanced instruction  $11FF will not work as expected anymore. This means there is no calling 8086 instructions anymore.  If any code written depends on this enhanced instruction it will fail.

More to come later;

John Collyer.
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