Such things were often done on loyalty to previous companies. It is like the Video Brain used the F8 or that Olivetti used the Z8000 for the M20.
The Video Brain was because the designer had worked on the F8 at Fairchild. The M20 was because Faggin was Italian and had connections to Olivetti. Such things were not always done because they were better or cheaper. Woz was rare in his way of thinking at the time. He was mostly looking for cheap but having a rich set of addressing mode was surely a plus. Dwight ________________________________ From: cctalk <cctalk-boun...@classiccmp.org> on behalf of Cameron Kaiser via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> Sent: Friday, June 2, 2017 9:37:13 AM To: ccl...@sydex.com; cctalk@classiccmp.org Subject: Re: I hadn't made the connection before > I sold a bare CP1600 chip about a year ago to a collector. "Odd" is an > understatement. A 10-bit wide instruction word, with the upper 6 bits of > the opcode unused. Loading a 16-bit address took three words. > > Also, slow, very slow, with no I/O instructions. But that was because it has memory-mapped I/O, no? On the other hand the decles were weird and it has a lot of instructions that were removed. Retrospectively a 6502 or a Z80 would have looked like a better choice in this application, even considering this was supposed to be a higher-end console. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com<http://www.floodgap.com> * ckai...@floodgap.com -- Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. -- 1 Corinthians 8:1 ---------------
