Chapter 2. Foreword

For a customer I started (2009) a redesign for a machine containing a MC14500. A goal was re-using the many MC14500 programs that have been written and being field-proved over many decades. Since the MC14500 is no more in production, a replacement with all its low voltage peripherals has been done using a FPGA. A second step vision was to convert the MC14500 code back to parallel processing VHDL for the FPGA.

In parallel to this activity, I published the stuff not restricted to the non-disclosure agreement on the Internet. Since I'm surprised about the echo from the Internet I'd like to finish a complete MC14500 opens source package.

The MC14500 chip can still be found at https://www.ebay.com

The main goal of this project is having a MC14500 that runs a program assembled by the mc14500 assembler. Other goals are:

have a hardware around the MC14500 that is state of the art and available long term or be easily portable (Unfortunately FPGA families and their tool chain are complex and are not very stable over time)
test the assembler and disassembler on a hardware and on a simulator
reduce the hardware to a minimum
allow debugging and be flexible for different MC14500 architectures