Williams Electronics used the 6809 in Defender, Robotron, Joust and Sinistar. It was more expensive. Tandy chose it for the TRS-80 Color Computer and sacrificed dedicated sound generation hardware for it to keep costs down.
> Tandy chose it for the TRS-80 Color Computer and sacrificed dedicated sound generation hardware for it to keep costs down.
The result of that though is an excellent example of 'software eating the world' and allowed for a whole pile of other tricks to be pulled (in software!) that would have required more circuitry in other computers. For instance, the tape interface used it, as well as the joystick interface. If you were a bit more adventurous you could use it for analog in as well as analog out.
Although the 6809 was assembly-source level compatible with most of the 6800 opcodes, it was not binary compatible, and was in fact a totally new (better) design.
Same year I faxed them a resume touting my 8-bit assembly experience. Dodged a bullet there, although I'm sure I could have picked up another architecture pretty quickly.
We switched to C++. Nobody had a problem with the switch, although multitheading became a sticky point with some of the developers so we had to write an API to simulate nonpreemptive tasking like the old assembly system.
The result of that though is an excellent example of 'software eating the world' and allowed for a whole pile of other tricks to be pulled (in software!) that would have required more circuitry in other computers. For instance, the tape interface used it, as well as the joystick interface. If you were a bit more adventurous you could use it for analog in as well as analog out.