Re(2): [SunRescue] HOW useful 690/MP

[James Lockwood]

On Wed, 15 Sep 1999, Tim Hauber wrote:

> Wow, that 68000 line is versatile.  I remember getting a board out of a
> PDP11 that used one for something in the memory system.  Everybody seems
> to have used it for something, whether it was as an actual primary
> processor, or as some kind of controller.

It certainly is.  I have sitting on my desk an AT/370 card set, which used
2 68000's (one "stock", the other with a tweaked mask) to emulate the
System/370 instruction set in both software and hardware.  It got a
whopping 50 mainframe KIPS in 1986.

The 68000 makes a great embedded CPU even now, as with a crystal, an
EPROM, and one decent PLD you can build a complete single board computer
around it.  A nice step up when your Z80 runs out of steam, and best of
all you can use older Mac compilers to generate code (a friend of mine won
the last 2 west-coast Micromouse competitions with one):

http://www2.hawaii.edu/~mariels/micromouse.htm

And yes, you _can_ hand-solder surface mount parts.  You can even get
pretty darn good at it after a while.  :)

-James