!pr1
A Powerful 65816 Board on the Horizon......Bob Sander-Cederlof

Some of you may have heard of Micro Magic, a company in Mary- land that is planning to produce a plug-in card for your Apple with fast RAM and a fast 65816.  Well, if not, now you have.

I spoke yesterday with Will Troxell, and got an overview of their plans.  He and Frank Krol are working together on the project.  Their goal is to produce the most powerful and flexible card they can and yet still bring it in for a low price.  The card will basically be similar to the Accelerator //e, in that it consists of a fast microprocessor, fast RAM, and the logic to take control away from the 6502 or 65C02 on your Apple motherboard.

But instead of a 65C02 running at 3.58 MHz, you will get a 65816 running at 6 MHz.  Instead of one row of RAM chips, you get two.  Troxell's board will probably come with 64K or 128K of 6MHz dynamic RAM, but later this year they have been promised that 256K RAMs fast enough for 6 MHz operation will be in production; then you will be able to expand your  board to 256K or 512K bytes of RAM.

There is a firmware socket on the board which can accept a 27128 (16K bytes of firmware, the same as you find in a //c).  They do not plan to include any firmware at the beginning, but it certainly can be filled up with your own goodies.

There are two external connectors on the board.  One of these allows you to add another 512K RAM.  Remember, this is directly addressable RAM, not bank-switched.  The 65816 can directly address up to 16 megabytes, with its 24-bit address bus.

It is also exciting to remember that a plain ol 6502 running at 1 MHz (what you have now) is roughly equivalent in speed to most of the 8088 and Z-80 computers on the market.  A 6 MHz 6502 could beat a 20MHz Z-80 (were they to make one so fast).  A 6 MHz 65816 will beat out 68000's, 80286's, and so on.  Why is this true?  Because all those other chips use micro- programmed instruction sets, taking many clock cycles for each instruction.  The 6502 and its progeny are fully implemented in hardware gates, so only a handful of clock cycles are needed.

Furthermore, a 65816 instruction will take from one to four bytes of memory, while a 68000 instruction will take 2, 4, 6, 8, or 10 bytes.  Now I am not trying to deny the power of some of those 68000 instructions.  One of them may take many steps in 65816 code.  Especially if you need to deal with 32-bit operands.  But it is my experience that those super instructions are relatively infrequent in practical programs.  Most programs spend most of their time just moving bytes from here to there and back again.

Now if we could only get one!  For about fifteen months we have been hearing "in two to four weeks".  We could despair, were it not for our historical perspective.  The same thing happened with the 65C02, and now we really do have them in abundance.  By this time next year, you may be hearing solid confirmation of the rumor (heard this week) that Apple and GTE are discussing large orders of 65816s.

But I digress.  Back to Troxell and Krol.  There new board will be called the MAX-816, and a new operating system they are designing for it will be MAX-OS.  A special circuit on the card will optimize memory re-mapping for both DOS and ProDOS, automatically, so that maximum possible use is made of the fast RAM on the card.  THe fewer times the card has to slow down to use motherboard RAM, the faster your programs fly.

MAX-OS will not be necessary for you to get a bang out of MAX-816, because it will work like the Accelerator //e and make most existing programs six times faster (exclusive of I/O).  But when it is ready, it will open up new vistas, with RAM stretching out in every direction as far as the eye can see.  In a design reminiscent of one from a certain large phone company, the kernel is written in assembly language, with a C-shell wrapped around it.

Personally, I am no great fan of complex operating systems.  The simpler and smaller the better, in my book.  I still like DOS 3.3, especially with enhancements I regularly patch in.  Nevertheless it does take more management when you have the magnitude and variety of resources that will be in the Apple of the future.  Maybe MAX-OS will be the winner.

If Will and Frank are whetting your appetite, you can write to them at Micro Magic, Box 281, Millersville, MD 21108.  Or you might be able to reach them at (301) 987-6083.
