6800compatible

6800compatible refers to hardware or software designed to run, or interoperate with, the Motorola 6800 family of microprocessors. It is used to describe systems, peripherals, or development tools that can execute 6800 code or otherwise emulate the 6800’s behavior. The term often implies varying degrees of compatibility, from exact instruction set and timing to more approximate emulation.

The Motorola 6800 is an 8-bit microprocessor introduced in the mid-1970s. It uses accumulators and a 16-bit index or pointer register, a 16-bit program counter, and a separate stack pointer. Its instruction set includes multiple addressing modes such as immediate, direct, extended, and indexed addressing, and it operates with a condition code register to reflect the results of operations. The 6800’s design influenced a number of later CPUs and microcontrollers, and a wide ecosystem of companion peripherals and development tools arose around it, including various peripheral interface adapters and serial interfaces.

In practice, 6800 compatibility can range from strict hardware compatibility to software emulation. Strict compatibility means exact opcode semantics, addressing behavior, and flag changes as defined by the 6800, suitable for running unmodified 6800 machine code. Emulation or compatibility layers may reproduce functional behavior on non-6800 CPUs, potentially with different timing or cycle counts. Some later microcontrollers in the 6800 family, such as 6801/6803 devices, offer 6800-compatible instruction sets with integrated I/O, while other systems provide 6800-mode or 6800-driven firmware interfaces without full equivalence.

Usage of 6800compatible appears in retrocomputing, legacy software preservation, and development tooling, where enthusiasts seek to run or translate 6800 code on modern hardware or in emulated environments.