Back in the "old days" when the 805x was new, we thought of it as unconventional because it was a Harvard architecture, had no I/O instructions, and, generally was off-putting to those of us who were accustomed to "normal" von Neumann processors of that time. (SFR's ??? ... what are those??? Why can't I access the upper half of IRAM directly? ... Four banks of register/scratchpad???)

It's not so off-putting to the newbie, however, as he's not accustomed to "normal" stuff. He's also isolated from the architecture by the 'C' compiler, so he doesn't have to worry about the architecture until it's absolutely necessitated by his need for low-level control (which the compiler doesn't allow him) over what's going on.

This makes the availability of an IDE for "self-education" much more important. Eventually, one learns to live without it, no matter what the architecture, but when starting out, it's much simpler if the IDE is there, no matter how weak, to "hold one's hand" while going through the early steps.

RE