Re: FAA To Finally Ditch Floppy Disks & Win-95

On Tue, 17 Jun 2025 23:11:57 -0400
c186282 <c186282@nnada.net> wrote:

Weirdly I have a dream about finding a 9900 at a surplus store. The
prob with a lot of those older CPUs though was that they required a
lot of SUPPORT chips in order to do anything useful. This is a
serious complication for retro-homebrew.

That's true of pretty much any "retro" homebrew project, unless you're
using one of those Z80-core uCs with all the requisite peripherals on-
die; I see it as part of the challenge to come up with a useful system
design ;) The TMS9900 *is* a bit more complex than, say, a 6502 though,
as it uses a four-phase clock and *requires* a 16-bit bus (doesn't even
do 8-bit accesses on byte reads/writes!) The later iterations (TMS9995
and 99105/99110) are simpler, and also more cycle-efficient.