Question re booting a 68000 CPU

Dec 18, 2008 3 Replies

What are the essential signals required by a 68000 CPU in order to get its address lines active?



Obviously Clock and Reset - but what else MUST be functional?



I ask as I repair arcade PCBs and usually concentrate on 6502, 8080 and Z80 boards. However I've recently starting fixing up a few



68000-based boards from the late 80s/early 90s and a few, despite having valid Clock and Reset signals, are doing absolutely bugger all, ie no activity on any address lines, etc.

Now a 6502, 8080 or Z80 will fire up the address lines if they have valid Clock and Reset signals, but apparently this isn't the case with the 68000. Or is it? Does it also need to grab a valid piece of boot code from a connected ROM or EPROM?



Ta!



jamma-plusser expounded in news: snipped-for-privacy@news.zen.co.uk:

Your phasers are defective.

Snark.

If you dont get a better reply in a day or so, I'll dig out my 68000 documetation and look it up for you but IIRC all memory accesses not in

6800 compatibility mode needed a handshake. The address decoder must assert /DTACK for each memory cycle. 6800 compatibility was obtained by asserting /VPA at the start of the access cycle. The vector table is initialised from ROM when the CPU comes out of reset. The NOP instruction is *not* all zeros, but if you stuff the bus with zeros, it should accept the vector table and execute OR instruuctions with one of the registers till the cows come home.

Thanks, appreciate the info.

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