I played around with the Free toolchain (sdcc’s assembler and the easypdkprog programmer) and implemented a chiptune on it. It’s a really interesting MCU: the instruction set feels so dated, yet their peripherals are pretty powerful (albeit quirky).
But what fascinated me most about those chips was how quickly a community formed around reverse engineering documentation and tooling for the PDKs, despite (or possibly in spite) of the manufacturer not cooperating. The secrecy goes as far as that the instruction encoding not being published, and the IDE spitting out encrypted binaries, only readable by the proprietary hardware programmer. Yet, js_12345678_55AA et.al prevailed.
Honestly, when it comes to microcontrollers, 16 pins is pretty big. Not huge or even massive, but big. You don’t have an external data and address bus to deal with, just I/O ports, and most of those double-job heavily depending on the configuration of internal fuses and/or registers. For a lot of applications, you don’t need anything much bigger than an ATtiny85, and that’s just 8 pins. Much of that is down to the prevalence of SPI and I2C in embedded systems, even for external ROMs.
Tragically, due to the ongoing chip shortage the PMS150C is now a 4-cent microcontroller…
Is it bad I have a mild love for weird IDEs like this?
I played around with the Free toolchain (sdcc’s assembler and the easypdkprog programmer) and implemented a chiptune on it. It’s a really interesting MCU: the instruction set feels so dated, yet their peripherals are pretty powerful (albeit quirky).
But what fascinated me most about those chips was how quickly a community formed around reverse engineering documentation and tooling for the PDKs, despite (or possibly in spite) of the manufacturer not cooperating. The secrecy goes as far as that the instruction encoding not being published, and the IDE spitting out encrypted binaries, only readable by the proprietary hardware programmer. Yet, js_12345678_55AA et.al prevailed.
Nice! Your project is pretty darn cool. Chip tunes, algorithmically generated music, tiny assembly, and a 3 cent microcontroller all in one project!
/me glances at the 68010 DIP-64 on the workbench
Honestly, when it comes to microcontrollers, 16 pins is pretty big. Not huge or even massive, but big. You don’t have an external data and address bus to deal with, just I/O ports, and most of those double-job heavily depending on the configuration of internal fuses and/or registers. For a lot of applications, you don’t need anything much bigger than an ATtiny85, and that’s just 8 pins. Much of that is down to the prevalence of SPI and I2C in embedded systems, even for external ROMs.
If I’m looking at the right datasheet, they’re a whole centimeter long! Who has that much space?!
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