[Coco] Space Invaders - Translated from Intel 8080 to Motorola 6809 for the CoCo 3

camillus gmail camillus.b.58 at gmail.com
Tue Jan 3 23:07:03 EST 2017


Hallo Mark,

Do you use software to translate your 6502 > 6809?
And if so is it availlable?

Cb
On 1/3/2017 9:45:32 PM, Mark McDougall <msmcdoug at iinet.net.au> wrote:
On 4/01/2017 4:16 AM, Glen Hewlett wrote:

> I think by hand is the best way to do the transcoding in the end.

I've now 'completed' 3 projects; one 6502->6809, one Z80->6809 and one
8080->6809. Also half-way thru Z80->68K.

I would say there's definitely some merit in automated translation. I
found myself repeating the same instruction sequences over and over when
doing it by hand. Of course you'll never get an automated process
perfect or optimal, so there'll always be manual tweaking, but I would
say it could very well save some time.

Automation would work best when porting to a more capable system, eg.
Z80->68K. In fact, I'm thinking of redoing portions of said project
because I wasn't quite consistent in the early stages with my register
mappings, and perhaps automation would help with this.

> In the end, I probably did end up going through it line by line
> anyways since there are some many registers and things that need
> tweaking.

Yeah there's certain aspects that just can't be automated.

> MAME debug mode is so useful for doing
> this type of troubling shooting. I’d be lost without it.

MAME/MESS is an under-rated and under-utilised diagnostic, debugging and
development tool. Many, many years ago I used it to identify a faulty
DRAM chip on my Juno First PCB, by patching the driver to simulate a
faulty chip until I got the exact same display on MAME as I saw on my
cabinet!!!

Regards,

--
Mark McDougall


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