I recently learned that the Falcon had a Motorola DSP56k inside. The 56k is just about the coolest micro I've ever programmed. Has anyone done anything cool with it in the Falcon?
At Meridian Instruments in the 1990s we built laser scanning microscopes based on x86 PCs running PharLap DOS Extender and custom WIMP apps written in C and assembler. To help with real-time chores we added several microcontrollers: a Z80 to run the stepper motor XY stage; some MCS48s to run the Argon gas laser and more motors; and a Motorola DSP56k for data collection from the photomultiplier tubes.
For us the 56k was less a DSP and more a fast controller which happened to have a multiplier. It had lots of cool features:
- Easy interface to host CPU over ISA bus
- On-board RAM and bootstrap ROM - could download its own firmware from the host - very advanced in the days of UV EPROMs
- Many peripheral ports and variable speed bus
- Parallelism - up to 3 independent operations per instruction
- Fast interrupts - up to 2 instructions inserted into the pipeline without context switching
- High precision up to 56 bits, and saturation arithmetic
- Hardware DO loops with no execution time overhead
- Lots of registers and useful addressing modes
It was a fun and interesting challenge to program. For our next generation instrument we chose a newer 56k which included a bus mastering PCI interface. We finished the prototypes but the company died before we could produce it.
At Meridian Instruments in the 1990s we built laser scanning microscopes based on x86 PCs running PharLap DOS Extender and custom WIMP apps written in C and assembler. To help with real-time chores we added several microcontrollers: a Z80 to run the stepper motor XY stage; some MCS48s to run the Argon gas laser and more motors; and a Motorola DSP56k for data collection from the photomultiplier tubes.
For us the 56k was less a DSP and more a fast controller which happened to have a multiplier. It had lots of cool features:
- Easy interface to host CPU over ISA bus
- On-board RAM and bootstrap ROM - could download its own firmware from the host - very advanced in the days of UV EPROMs
- Many peripheral ports and variable speed bus
- Parallelism - up to 3 independent operations per instruction
- Fast interrupts - up to 2 instructions inserted into the pipeline without context switching
- High precision up to 56 bits, and saturation arithmetic
- Hardware DO loops with no execution time overhead
- Lots of registers and useful addressing modes
It was a fun and interesting challenge to program. For our next generation instrument we chose a newer 56k which included a bus mastering PCI interface. We finished the prototypes but the company died before we could produce it.