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Comment by coldcode | Hacker News Reader

Wow, my second CPU assembly language ever (after 6502). Amazing it's still relevant to anything. I also wrote code for a Z8000[0] in the 80's which is quite different.

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Being a child of the 6502, I could never respect the Z-80 for taking FOUR FULL CLOCK CYCLES to do a miserable NOP.

So the minimal sleep() is 4x times de clock. who cares?

Yes but Z80s were typically clocked at 4Mhz, and 6502s were more likely to be clocked at 1Mhz or so. Apples Vs Oranges. I started with Z80s and when I programmed a 6502 later I found, sure it's simple and orthogonal by comparison, all those good things. But it's not as much fun because there just aren't all the weird corners to explore. I think it's the mother syndrome at work.

Plain Z80's topped out at 2.5 MHz or so. The Z80A could do 4 MHz, but was launched in 1979. Apple IIs and Commodore clocked the 6502 at 1MHz, but Ataris used 1.8 (?) and the BBC micro was clocked at 2 MHz.

At that time, once launched, it was difficult to increase the clock of a computer because games would become unplayable.

C'mon man. Two 16-bit index registers and a relocatable stack pointer? What's not to like? Though 6502's zero page addressing modes were also awesome and pretty much used like IX and IY I think. Too bad the stack is stuck on page 1.

> I also wrote code for a Z8000[0] in the 80's which is quite different.

The Z80000 seems to have been a very obscure microprocessor. Even more so than the Z8000. What was the Z80000 system you worked with?

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