[awful]

The Heathkit/Zenith ET-3400 trainers with 6800s, and the accompanying Heath/Zenith coursework, were fantastic in 1982. 50+ of us completed it that year, the class final was bit-banging the tune of "Anchors Away" as the instructor was a Navy officer and educator, retired to civilian teaching. I later learned machine language on broken superscalar mainframes as bit-chaser, but the 6800 were simply fantastic devices and prepared me well. Flat, shared memory, von Neumann architecture. Very nice op codes and indexing, as I recall. Ill have to go back to my coursework and reminisce...

[Marcus10110]

I have an ET-3400 on the shelf behind me! I was just playing with it the other day. After watching Jason Turner's CppCon talk on writing an i386 to 6502 assembly translator [1][2], I started working on a fork that would target the 6800. I only got about 3 instructions working, but that's really all you need for some really simple test code with optimization turned to the max. It also turns out that someone wrote a fantastic emulator specifically for the ET-3400 trainer [3], and I managed to get my application running on it!

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBkNBP00wJE [2] https://github.com/lefticus/6502-cpp [3] https://github.com/CalPlug/Heathkit_ET-3400

There is something special to me about the idea of writing modern C++, and compiling it for such early microprocessors. The 512 bytes of RAM is a pretty big limitation though. I wanted to try and emulate an EEPROM using an Arduino or FPGA, but got stalled out on the project. From time to time I like to browse through the LLVM backend documentation, but I can't seem to commit to trying to build a backend.

[B1FF_PSUVM]

> Flat, shared memory [...] nice op codes and indexing, as I recall.

Yeah, that was what the guy working with the Moto chips smirked at us slaving on Intel 808x contraptions, back in those days ...

[Salgat]

I learned assembly on a 68HC11 heathkit, damn those things were awesome!