The Motorola 68000

I got into Motorola 680x processors first, and from there the obvious path was the 68000.

Soon after the 68000 came out, Byte ran articles on not only the processor but also the computers that used it -- foremost the Apple Macintosh, but also the Amiga, Atari ST, Corvus Concept, Fortune 32:16 and others. When I started studying at the University of Stellenbosch in 1985, I found the Byte shelf in the Engineering Library, and my studies diverged somewhat from what the lecturers were trying to teach me.

Design Philosophy Behind Motorola's MC68000, part 1, part 2 and part 3.

Homebrew 68000

My first 68000 system was homebrewed on three Eurocards. Read about it here.

I am slowly writing a new monitor for it, based on FBUG68K, dBUG and DdriagDOS, using cross-tools created by Stephen Moody's excellent script.

Quelo assembler

I've been using the Quelo assembler which I downloaded from bode.ee.ualberta.ca (184140 Mar 16 1991 asm68k.tar.Z) back in 1994. Here's a local copy QUELOASM.ZIP.

This assembler can be used to assemble the tutornew monitor mentioned in the comp.sys.m68k FAQ -- I get a bit-identical image so things obviously work right.

My notes on using the Quelo crossassembler.

EASy68K

I've also played with EASy68K which does provide an IDE Integrated Development Environment) but I prefer the Quelo assember.

asmx

Another nice assembler is Bruce Tomlin's asmx. I had to install Cygwin to compile the Windows binary asmx.exe (you also need cygwin1.dll and while the documentation claims that an asterisk at the beginning of a line is a comment, I had to add a line "if (*linePtr == '*') return;" to the DoLine() function to make this work.

But it runs under Windows 7 so it's less of a schlepp than Quelo. On the other hand it does require a ';' before the comment at the end of the line so I would need to edit TUTORNEW or whatever to make it compile with asmx.

WinHex

WinHex is a Windows hex viewer / editor. It can join two ROM (Hi/Lo) files into a single binary. Tools -> File tools -> Unify -> Bytewise. File 1 is Hi, File 2 is Lo.

Humbug

Peter Stark wrote HUMBUG for the 6809 and 68000. It's free for non-commercial use by accepting this agreement.

Linux 68K

Steve over at Big Mess o' Wires made Linux run on a solderless breadboard 68008 (!).

68000 on the Apple


Some links and stuff:

[Image] Hit Count
hits since 2004-02-09.

Back to Wouter's Page (This page last modified 2023-10-01)