[Coco] Kicking the Z-80 butts...

Zippster zippster278 at gmail.com
Tue Apr 28 15:20:41 EDT 2015


Well, it is late ‘70s technology.  Earlier that decade the first microprocessors were introduced.
I guess the 6847’s major weak point is probably the terribly limited 32 column text display.
Other VDGs of the time were pretty low-resolution as well.  But you have to remember there 
wasn’t much resolution available on the display devices either, even if you would have had the silicon for it.

Video is just a massive amount of data once you start to move past 300x200 or so and just a few colors.
Even the 6809 will start to choke pretty quickly heading in that direction.

Although it is a pretty incredible 8-bit CPU with an interesting story behind it.
It should have been more popular.

- Ed


> On Apr 28, 2015, at 1:28 PM, Gustavo Ranaur Schoenaker <ranaur at ranaur.net> wrote:
> 
> Really amazing.
> 
> The more I know the 6809 the more I think the problem with the chip was no
> t the processos, but the 6847. Maybe it was the reason Tandy made the GIME
> chip on CoCo 3. Video is really the upper limit of the plataform. At those
> times the video chip make a huge difference.
> 
> Nice job Luis!
> 



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