Re: 6809 in a C64

From: Anders Carlsson <anders.carlsson_at_sfks.se>
Date: Wed, 23 May 2018 16:28:20 +0200
Message-ID: <f79e6120-9182-e123-cf8c-2b7402de53ee@sfks.se>
Mia Magnusson wrote:

> Maybe they used hires mode to be able to freely select foreground and 
> background colors?
>
Bingo!

I just downloaded Teledata.CRT and remembered that the title screen has 
double height text which of course requires either a full set of custom 
characters or working in hires mode. According to a register dump in 
VICE, $D011 is set to $3B = hires mode and $D018 = $29. The latter 
register appears to be set all the time, which kind of suggests there 
are two buffers of hires data so the program can switch between those. 
Probably that it loads and generates a videotex page in the buffer not 
currently displayed and switches to that one when it is done.

Whether generating a hires screen for every page loaded had been faster 
with a 6809 in the cartridge to offload the 6510 inside the computer is 
beyond my knowledge, but I understand that the BTX cartridges might use 
the 680x chips more due to the (existing?) hardware decoding solution 
was based on those CPUs than for speed purposes.

Best regards

Anders Carlsson
Received on 2018-05-23 17:00:41

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