> That was beautiful. Nicely done, and congratulations on your restomod A1000!

Author here. Thanks, had a lot of fun! Not sure why the original post from a few days ago didn't merge with this one, it's the same url ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42832032

Yeah, you posted it a few hours before I did (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42839928), and neither got voted up (and, mysteriously, mine was not detected as a dupe inside a very short time window, as it seems like it should happen).

I'm going to blame the first part on us being in Europe and most of the HN crowd living in US timezones :)

There are some esoteric rules about what qualities for a merge and what doesn't. Sadly, I can never remember them

We really had fun reading this. Great games: firepower emerald mines, crystal hammer and dungeonaster.

My friend had the 512 fast ram upgrade, and later a Lucas accelerator.

680[01]0 had only 23 address lines (A1-A23), 16-bit word size, thus 16 MB addressable memory.

There’s also LDS (lower data select) and UDS pins for 8-bit I/O chips.

Modern AMD64 CPUs only have around 48 address lines, but we don't describe them as 48 bit. Registers and pointers are 32 bit, too.

Likewise, the 6502 and Z80 had 16 address lines, but we never describe them as 16-bit.

Right, it is generally about the ALU.

It is hard to give registers too much weight, because both Moto designs used large registers.

It was pretty commonly accepted at the time that the 68000 was a "16-bit CPU" because of its ALU and data bus width, despite the 32-bit being clearly ISA. The Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, for instance, is always referred to as a 16-bit console, even having it embossed right on its shell.

The technical truth is that using a single number to describe the "bits" of a CPU is going to be inadequate in many cases (including this) so this was a choice by marketing.

I'm not sure why that was the case; one would think marketers would have rushed to use the biggest, most impressive sounding numbers available. Maybe they wanted to keep something in reserve for when the 68020 came down the pipe? Maybe they were scared of being criticized or even sued for false advertising since the chip wasn't "truly" 32-bit?

Like the 6809 is an 8 bit chip?

I buy that argument.

My personal reference is the 68K is a 16 bit chip, like the 6809 is an 8 bit chip.

Moto just made really great CPUs at that time.

And the fact is Moto did well by making sure the future was clear for 32 bits. Mostly just a hardware change.

(Except for people who stuffed info into those upper address bits. Oops!)

Well, I don't think there was any consensus. Atari played on this with the "ST" (for sixteen/thirty-two) product label. From the software side it was 32bit. The flat, huge (at that time) address space made things so much easier (compared to the awful segmentation of the Intel CPUs then). That the ALU was just 16bits meant that some operations took longer than one would have liked, but was otherwise of no concern. No "far pointers" or any such crutches.

That's how I see it. As a developer, you still used 32-bit math operations in assembly and the CPU executed them as a series of 16-bit ops. The details are abstracted away. IMO, that made it 32 bits.

By analogy, SATA is a serial protocol, but you wouldn't ordinarily refer to it as a 1-bit bus.

That’s not my recollection at the time. It was always 16-bit. The Archimedes was often portrayed with the USP of being 32-bit at the time.