Compared to the 8080, the Z80, the 6809, 6502, and all the other 8-bit microprocessors used in boxxen of yore, the CPU I’m using for this project - the Motorola 68000 is both extremely powerful and extraordinarily complex. The power comes from a huge address space and some neat features like a divide instruction. The complexity comes from it’s asynchronous nature.

A single-board computer using the 8-bit 6502 processor is very simple compared to a 68k computer. Conjuring up a simple 8-bit computer is as simple as getting a RAM and ROM chip, connecting all the data and address lines together, and throwing together a little logic glue to get the whole thing working. The 68k is another story entirely. Thanks to its asynchronous nature, you have to deal with something called the DTACK, or Data Transfer Acknowledge. This is an input pin on the processor that indicates the the data transfer from RAM or ROM is completed. If this isn’t low at the right time, the entire system just stops.

Making sure the data gets from the memory to the CPU isn’t enough? There’s 64 pins on the 68000, and there’s more than a few more useless pins for my project.

The bus arbitration pins - /BR, /BG. and /BGACK control which device in the system controls the data and address busses. It’s great for DMA operations, crazy video schemes, and shoving data from a cassette port directly to memory without going through the processor. DMA would require a good bit of circuitry, though, and I won’t be using it anyway.

Oh. There’s also processor status pins on the 68k. These are output pins that tell the system if the current cycle is being used for user data, user program, supervisor data, supervisor program, or an interrupt. Very cool, and a good example of how the 68000 was inspired by the minicomputers of the 70s, but utterly useless for a small box that will sit on my desk, tweet, and play Breakout.

Complex, yes, but I don’t actually need to use all those pins. Those processor status pins can be easily ignored. I won’t be doing any cool DMA stuff with this computer, so I can just tie the /BR, /BG, and /BGACK pins to +5 Volts. Pins /IPL0, /IPL1, and /IPL2 only indicate the priority level of an interrupt, and I can’t imagine designing hardware in response to an interrupt in this system.

With all those useless pins out of the way, what am I left with? I have 24 address lines, 16 data lines, a reset pin and four pins for controlling memory access:

/AS - Address strobe

Indicates there is valid data on the address bus

R/W - Read / Write

Defines whether the data bus is being used for reading or writing

/UDS and /LDS - Upper and Lower Data Strobe

Indicates the presence of valid data on the data bus. When the CPU is reading the data bus, if /UDS is high, data bits 0-7 are vaild. If /LDS is high, data bits 8-15 are valid.

E, /VPA, and /VMA - 6800 Peripheral control

These lines are used for interfacing 6800-series chips with the CPU. Since I’ll be using a 6850 ACIA, these pins are necessary

/DTACK - Data Transfer Acknowlegdge

This is a line going into the 68000 to tell the CPU a device has received data on the data bus. If I were not using 6800-compatable parts or the 6800 peripheral control pins, I could simply tie /DTACK to ground and hope my memory is fast enough. That’s the easy way out, and I’d really like to do this project right. Generation of the /DTACK signal is easy enough.

And that’s it. There are a ton of pins on the 68000, but if you want to build a simple computer you can ignore everything except the data and address pins and four bus control pins. The amazingly complex 68k then turns into a very very simple synchronous CPU just like the 6802 and Z80. Really, other than the fact a 16-bit homebrew computer requires twice as many RAM chips (although you could always use a 16-bit RAM chip), this really isn’t any different than building an 8-bit something on a breadboard and putting BASIC on it.