Path: csiph.com!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: John Ames Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc Subject: Re: FAA To Finally Ditch Floppy Disks & Win-95 Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2025 08:01:14 -0700 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 16 Message-ID: <20250618080114.00003e55@gmail.com> References: <8J-dncxXHYwjZ9H1nZ2dnZfqn_qdnZ2d@giganews.com> <20250616093523.0000032c@gmail.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Injection-Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2025 17:01:21 +0200 (CEST) Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="579d2c58ca4ce55a33ca61b778df127b"; logging-data="3296754"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX18Rsci/7zkKH3Iwta+eqsGbKWTgW2v7i5g=" Cancel-Lock: sha1:fcEUCpUHFlgc5HeatSAIR1IjacA= X-Newsreader: Claws Mail 4.3.0 (GTK 3.24.42; x86_64-w64-mingw32) Xref: csiph.com comp.os.linux.misc:68878 On Tue, 17 Jun 2025 23:11:57 -0400 c186282 wrote: > Weirdly I have a dream about finding a 9900 at a surplus store. The > prob with a lot of those older CPUs though was that they required a > lot of SUPPORT chips in order to do anything useful. This is a > serious complication for retro-homebrew. That's true of pretty much any "retro" homebrew project, unless you're using one of those Z80-core uCs with all the requisite peripherals on- die; I see it as part of the challenge to come up with a useful system design ;) The TMS9900 *is* a bit more complex than, say, a 6502 though, as it uses a four-phase clock and *requires* a 16-bit bus (doesn't even do 8-bit accesses on byte reads/writes!) The later iterations (TMS9995 and 99105/99110) are simpler, and also more cycle-efficient.