Retrocomputing: A Java-based 6809 emulator

The purpose of this project is to create an 6809 emulator that can be configured at runtime with a range of memory mapped devices. You can allocate RAM, load data into the memory and set up devices.

Emulators

The original emulator is v6809. It uses a Java properties file for the configuration. Several examples are provided. The most interesting is the genericos9. It is a graphics application that runs OS-9 Level 1 in multi-user mode with two terminals, two disk drives and a printer. The other called mo5 emulates a Thomson MO-5 with a cassette tape device.

Devices

• Acia6551 emulates a Roswell 6551 UART.
• Acia6850 emulates a Motorola 6850 UART.
• Both Acias can be configured with 3 different user interfaces: AciaConsoleUI writes to Java's System.out and reads from System.in. AciaGraphicalUI uses Java Swing to create a simple terminal and AciaTelnetUI opens a socket on port 2323, which the user can telnet to.
• IRQBeat sends an IRQ interrupt every 20 milliseconds to the CPU.
• HWClock makes it possible to get the date and time from the host of the emulator.
• VirtualDisk interfaces a DSK image to the emulator as a floppy or harddisk.
• PIA6821 emulates a Motorola 6821 Peripheral Interface Adapter

Because of their modularity, the Microware OS-9 or NitroOS9 operating systems can easily be configured to take advantage of these devices. Each device has a corresponding OS-9 device driver.

The MC6809 was an 8-bit CPU with some 16-bit features from Motorola introduced in the late 70-ies. OS-9 was sold as a business operating system that enabled word processing, spreadsheets and various programming languages. By today's standards it is obsolete. It only handles 7 bit ASCII and it is not year 2000 aware.

Build instructions

This project uses Maven. You can get the software from https://maven.apache.org/. To build the software and create the manuals type:

mvn install

Visit the sub-directories to learn how to use the tools.