▲Meanwhile, roughly contemporaneously, the Motorola 68000 was a CPU with 32-bit registers and a 16-bit bus (there was also the 68008 which had an 8-bit bus) - but in the 80s both the PC and 68000 devices were generally referred to as 16-bit. I guess the argument is that the 8088 was a cut down 8086 (an unambiguously 16-bit CPU) while the 68k family didn't ship a 32-bit bus until the 68020, but it's interesting how handwavy terminology is here (see also the "64 bit" Atari Jaguar)
reply▲In the Atari ST article from yesterday I read the 68000 was very pleasant to program for. I wonder how does it compare to 808x?
reply▲808x registers are all 16 bit, despite it having a 20 bit address space. That means you can't fit a full memory address in a single register, which means memory is split into 64K "segments" and you have a separate segment register that tells the CPU which segment you're referring to (segments can overlap, so this is distinct from banked memory). On its own that makes writing 808x code fucking miserable.
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