Hitachi 6309

Hi, lately I got interested in the Hitachi 6309 cpu. The 6309 was originally planned to be a Hitachi liscense to the Motorola 6809 cpu but Hitachi decided to instead make a 6809 compatable chip that included new opcodes, new registers, and a second mode that ran most instructions a cycle or two faster.

I don't know what this chip was used for, any arcade games, computers, ect?, but it does have an interesting assembly language, and it does seem pretty fast compared to a lot of other older cpus.

Does anyone know how fast the 6309 was in comparison to other chips like the 6502 and the 68000?, and why it wasn't used in any home video game system?

 

The 6309 came out far too late and being slower then the 68000 didn't really present too many advantages once you factor in costs. The two famous computers to use the 6809 was the Dragon 32/64 and Tandy CoCo (Color Computer) and both of them built the computer using a datasheet that Motorola did to sell the 6809 and other supporting ICs hence them being the same more or less. The 6809 was used by Fujitsu too in the FM-7 and FM-8 but by the time the 6309 came out Fujitsu were already on the FM Towns...

The 6309 was used in a few arcade boards, mainly by Konami who seem to make arcade boards depending on what chips they had in the parts bin and was used in The Main Event, Lethal Enforcers, Blades of Steel and Devastators and was used by Technos in Double Dragon.

The 6309 allowed decent page mapping so you could access up to 1MB of RAM and was used as a third party upgrade in the vastly under rated Tandy Color Computer 3 which made it quite a powerhouse but not quite Atari ST speedy but close and ran OS/9 and Flex fast.

I have a Tandy CoCo 3 with said chip.

 

are you talking about clock speed, or it's efficiency at a specific clock speed?

 

Oh man, from what I've read of the chip it's amazing. The 6809 and R65C02 have no problem performing next to a 68k at the same speed, but the 6309 could give the 68k some trouble when in native mode

 

I've been looking through the 6309 instruction set and it truely is an underrated chip. Why it used in only lower range computers is beyond me? Doing some tests, it looks like a 5 Mhz 6309 would be capable of competing with a 12 Mhz 68000 at least that is what I figured. It even has some 1 cycle opcodes which were a rarity before risc cpus came out.

About the only thing the 68k had for it was it looked good on paper (okay which sounds like it would go faster, a 5 Mhz 6309 or a 12 Mhz 68000?) and the 68k had a lot of people who knew how to program it well.

 

68000 was made to be built upon on in future.... 68040 is 2x faster than 80486 at same clock, and 3x faster when it comes to floating point stuff for example...

 

The 6309 was a nice CPU and ran OS/9 quite well and the Tandy CoCo 3 was probably one of the best 8 bit computers built but it wasn't going to challenge the 68000 in any way as the fastest the chip ever got was a whole 3Mhz (12Mhz external clock).

 

I still think the 8080 or the slightly modified one in the GB/CGB are amazing processors. Basically its 8080 with BIT commands and (HLI) as an addressing mode.
I've read that in the US some modules on computer programming degrees use CGBs. I guess they are cheap, you can run an emulator on a PC and flash software easily and cheaply.
I BET Intelligent Systems have a lot of CGB devkits sat on a shelf somewhere. If you wanted to do a degree module using them and you got an OK from Nintendo (got to be good PR and they lose nothing) then it would be great. Here would be my 1 term (4 months minus holidays) syllabus.

Week 1

-Hello World.
-Scrolling

 

The first microprocessor game I ever wrote was on a 8080 (in a computer called the CompuColor II, which was a pretty nice machine for it's time), and I wouldn't rank the 8080 as an amazing processor.

I do think that once you worked on any processor for awhile, you learn the ins and outs, and the limitation become less 'limiting'. At the end of the day, who really cares what the processor is... it is what you do with that processor, right?
--Selgus

 

Piglet is under the dislusion that the GB processer despite having Z80 Mnemonics, a number of Z80 instructions and even lacking a number of instructions like EX HL,DE or the sign flags is a 8080... The 8080 is a pig of a processer with it's horrid Mnemonics (Z80 LD (HL),A ; LD (DE),A : 8080 MOV M,A ; STAX D )

 

I kind of want to build a video game system around this, but there are 3 problems with it.

1) If somebody markets a new 16-bit system nowadays, noone would buy it.

2) I don't think this chip is made, or is easy to find anymore.

3) I don't really know how to make my own hardware.

Well I guess all three problems can be fixed, since if:

1) I make the hardware of NeoGeo-like quality, or extremely good 2D hardware, with a load of amazing action games that make use for the hardware, people might want to by it. (I always wanted to create action games with tons of explosions and destroyable surroundings and giant monsters and robots)

2) Maybe if I look hard enough on ebay for it, I'll find it.

3) Maybe I'll learn how to build hardware in college.

I got so into planning on making a videogame system that I even thought out specifications and a bunch of other little details about it. I just don't know how to build the chips I need.

EDIT: Looked on ebay, couldn't find anything. I guess if I make my own system, I would have to use the 68000 instead, but come on, like where's the originality in using that?

 

Check out the xgamestation website. They might be able to help you with the ins and outs of marketing a custom console.

 

There are a number of graphic chips out there, check out the Yamaha V9990, quite a powerful little chip, was meant to be the chip in the MSX Turbo R series, but Yamaha couldn't make the numbers until too late.

 

I think the 6309 would be too hard to find nowadays, but earlier today I read about the eZ80. My sources said that it is about 4x as fast as a regular Z80, so it is up there with the 6309 in cycle efficiency, plus I already like the Z80 archetecture and instruction set, and you can buy with higher clocked frequencies than you can find 6309 in.

The reason I'm not going to use the 68000 like every other 2D arcade machine, is just because I like originality.

Oh yeah, can somebody link me to a page eZ80 instruction set. I want to see what they upgraded and added and such. I tried to find one earlier, but only was able to find the plain vanilla Z80 instruction set.

 

If I'd had to make a game console, it would have a 680x0 family CPU or a custom derivate...

 

I was inquiring about the eZ80 too. Looks like a great chip from the specs. Someone informed me that they are extremely expensive in single unit quantities - like $200+ ... for some stupid reason. The 65c02 and 65816 and still available, among other small CPUs. There are a number of other chips as well. Or you could just go with whatever core running on a xilinix/fgpa.

 

Well a lot of places won't sell it in quanities less the 1000... however I could pick one up for around $12 (standard one with 512K flash RAM), try www.mouser.com for example.

As for the eZ80 have you read the user manual? http://www.zilog.com/docs/um0077.pdf just a thought....

 

I found that a few hours ago today.

I find it funny how I can't find one of those documents when I did a google search on eZ80 instruction set, but it was the first page to come up when I searched on the yahoo search engine?

 

If you're building custom hardware (SoC), you might as well synthesize a 200 MHz Z80.

 

I keep seeing MS-6309 showing up on the search engine. Does MS-6309 have anything to do with the Hitachi 6309, or is it completely different, and just happened to use the same name?