Developers Try Again To Upstream Motorola 68000 Series Support In LLVM

[Slartifartblast]

I program 6502 and 6809 myself, quite a bit. 6809 is a powerhouse compared the 6502, it's not even close. lol.

I am putting together a youtube video explaining these, but I even recently disassembled Duck Hunt for NES, which uses the 6502, and Defender the arcade game, which uses the 6809. If this interests you, the code is linked below.

https://github.com/AaronBottegal/Duc...ource_Code.src

https://github.com/AaronBottegal/Def...SourceCode.txt

I made a tool in ncurses on Linux that helped me put these together. It wraps around the ROMs, and you set the system state to each byte, and it spits out the code from the labels/comments I put "over" the binary. YouTube series coming soon!

Brings back memories, I'd need my old bible as a refresher, Carl Warren's "MC6809 Cookbook" which unfortunately I no longer have but can be found electronically here...

https://colorcomputerarchive.com/rep...OKS%20Inc).pdf

[Imroy]

Boy, did Michael goof this one.

[GruenSein]

Please simply fork instead of merging. Yes, tracking upstream will be more tedious but it is much better than all other LLVM development having to consider this niche backend. This is a novelty project with little to no real world use. I admire the hobbyists who dedicate their time to make this happen but please don't bloat the tools which are relevant to so many professionals. The benefits of bleeding edge upstream support are very few to this super old architecture anyway.

[Ardje]

The M68K is still actively produced. It's a 16/32 bit cpu. Currently there are still coldfires being produced afaik.
The 6800 however is a whole different beast. But I think it died. It's successors however survived for low end SoC's I think. Not sure if that's still is the case though.
Anyway, I doubt gcc has an 8 bit as a target.

[onicsis]

Boy, did Michael goof this one.

x86 architecture was not better than m68k.
Apple switched from CISC 68k to PowerPC then back to X86-64 CISC and then back to RISC. More like wind blows.

[MastaG]

So with support being in the linux kernel and gcc, can you actually compile and run a linux kernel on a 68k device?

[sykobee]

So with support being in the linux kernel and gcc, can you actually compile and run a linux kernel on a 68k device?

You can run Linux on an Amiga - although it will be a more embedded build than your typical Linux desktop. It will also need a useful MMU in the 68k.

https://wiki.debian.org/M68k/Status and apparently buildroot can create Amiga compatible embedded linux images.

[StarterX4]

Can't they just keep their garbage out of tree/forked?

[nokipaike]

since we are in discussion, someone remembers in summary, given that it was an architecture appreciated by many, so much so that it is still considered fun today, what were its limits so much to decide to abandon or almost abandon this cpu in search of something else instead of to evolve it?

[kpedersen]

Even just putting it in there for those creating homebrew games (for retro consoles) should surely be more interesting to the typical user of these forums than some of the typical cruft that gets added to compilers and kernels these days.

I.e it is more likely that people here have used a Megadrive emulator than they have some Blue Gene super computer.
Arguably an ancient m68k SDK is probably more useful for many open-source fans than some proprietary AAA game console SDK (which actively locks out casual developers)