To my American eyes, it’s missing one of the three “Trinity” machines: the TRS-80 and all its descendants. It’s also exclusively focused on the 6502, rather than the 6800, 6809, Z80, 8008…
Yes, the different CPUs added a richness to this time period readers are very likely to find enjoyable as well as enlightening.
Ahhh, the 6809! It's my favorite 8 bit CPU. If you've not given it a look, please reconsider. You are likely to benefit too. That chip is beautiful, and is a whole lot more powerful and elegant than one might expect an 8 bit CPU to be.
Let me seed the content a little: (and the 6800 too, because why not?)
Williams "DEFENDER" runs on a 6809 at 1Mhz, no blitter, no tiles, just a straight up bitmapped display. Here's a tutorial video with an expert player and a new gamer being introduced to the game. Lots of gems in their chatter and a good look at what an 8 bit CPU can really do:
Fun fact: DEFENDER plays one sound at a time, and the sound board is a 6800 (also a good CPU and missing from the list) connected right to a DAC to generate sound procedurally. Williams has a distinctive sound in all their classic games, and this board is why.
Amazingly, DEFENDER was ported to the Color Computer 3, the sound board replaced with samples. Doing that worked better than I thought it might, and overall the game play is on point. This port impresses me because of how different the frame buffer RAM layout is, and the 6809 being flexible enough in it's many addressing modes appears to manage in both scenarios. Very little is lost.
They made respectable machines using both the 6800 and 6809 chips.
The 6800 ended up in wonderful Tektronix computers and terminals. The computer was industrial, and intended for prototyping, science and industrial control and not commonly known. https://www.primidi.com/motorola_6800/personal_computers
The terminals were well known, high resolution vector, and wait for it...
CRT STORAGE TUBE displays! These delivered "4k" vector graphics in the 70's! The catch? No refresh cycles on the displays. Instead of blasting through all the vectors X times per second, these CRT displays would continue to glow, until erased for a new screen display.
The 4051 came with tape, X,Y analog joystick or dials, keyboard, display, and serial ports, and a very powerful "BASIC" that had a strong emphasis on math and graphics. I used this system to program CNC machines back in the day, and what could be done in BASIC on one was impressive.
Check out the demo set. These displays are beautiful and functional.
