What totally confused me at the time though were program listings in assembly (I couldn't figure out how you were meant to type those in) and especially the discussions of OS-9. I didn't know what it was, and even in some cases where I found a Radio Shack with the Tandy OS-9 distro, it was like 100$ and didn't have any games as near as I could tell, so I couldn't figure out why you would pay so much for it. Also I lived in a rural location where even the nearest 6809-oriented BBS would have meant expensive toll calls, so I missed the opportunity to learn that way.
Anyway skip forward, I started to college in 1993, immediately found Usenet, then Linux, and spent the next 30 years or so steeped in that world. Every so often I would go back and do a little reading on the 6809 world, but because I had never really understood most of what was going on, I didn't have a great deal of nostalgia.
Finally though, a few weeks ago I came across a link (maybe here?) to a release of the VCC emulator, and although I had played with a couple of 6809 emulators before, I hadn't really gone down the rathole of finding the MultiPak roms, or hard disk controller paks, etc. I found a couple of hard drive images, one from the NitrOS9 Ease of Use project, and another random NitrOS9 image packed with old software. What was particularly fascinating to me was the NitrOS9 source itself- since my introduction to Unix was in the 486-MMU-having-era, to see what people were able to do with a 6809 and an assembler was just a joy to read and understand.
I feel like probably everything that has ever needed doing on a 6809 has probably been done, and I've done enough 8 bit assembly stuff in school that I don't have a powerful urge to go back and make something myself, but boy what a feeling of having come full circle when I cd'd into the NitrOS9 source directory and found a makefile of all things! I feel so fortunate to have been able to live through a time of such explosive growth and change, and hope to get the chance to do a little OS-9 hacking when I retire some day :)
One use of all that was to fix the CoCo's clone of the arcade video game Galaxian, called Galactic Attack[1]. The CoCo had analog joysticks, and the writer of Galactic Attack thought it would be neat to have the ship you control track the X axis of the joystick. Except it would be unfair to whip the joystick from one side of the screen to the other while avoiding the enemy shots. So in the Galactic Attack game, the player ship lazily tracked the position of the joystick, moving slowly to the position of the stick. In practice this made the player ship hard (for me) to control and felt unresponsive. And it made it hard to hold still in the case an enemy bomb was close by.
I had already modified one of my Atari 2600 joysticks to work on the CoCo (probably a Rainbow magazine article). So what I did next was to modify the joystick routine to just create three zones (move left, dead zone, move right) for the X axis values. The game may or may not have been written with all relative branches (instead of absolute), so I might have had to fix that too.
Good times.
Towards the end of the 1980's I upgraded to a CoCo3, with 512KiB of RAM (wow! so much), a disk drive (156KiB) and OS-9 level 2. Also got the C compiler for OS-9 when it was on sale (discontinued).
My final setup would have the entire operating system loaded into RAM, with a RAM disk, upon which I'd copy in the C compiler. And display it via a glorious 80 columns on a monochrome monitor. It was with all that I started writing my own vi clone, but didn't get too far.
And a bunch of homebrew in between. But a 6809 with 512K RAM would have been very nice :)
I sorely wanted an Atari 520ST when they first came out, but it was more than I could afford at the time.
After graduating from university, I eventually got a Gateway 386 with a whopping 4MiB of RAM. In part to play Wing Commander and Castle Wolfstein. I've mostly been a PC guy since, though I've dabbled in RISC-V more recently. Not ready yet to make that my main desktop though.
The ST was my first 'serious' computer, with a massive amount of memory and an optional hard drive it really unlocked a whole bunch of capabilities, such as compiled languages and more RAM to work with, I used it for all kinds of commercial projects. In many ways X86 felt like a step back after working with the ST, especially after I figured out how to add more RAM to it. It also had a whole slew of useful ports including MIDI.
Today I use an old Thinkpad as my daily driver and it's funny, it's probably the oldest piece of hardware that I have here (a W540, 9 years old, $300 second hand including the 32G RAM in it), but it performs admirably and it uses very little power (everything on solar here so that matters a lot).
But I've been eyeing that RISC-V stuff as well and like you I'm still in hold mode. But it's getting closer.