This is an online emulator designed to make it as easy as possible to get started programming the Motorola 6809 CPU in assembly language. There's the obligatory Hello World program ready for you to assemble (click the big green button marked Assemble...) and run (click the big green button marked Run (it's beneath all the dials and knobs to the left)). If all goes well you will see a greeting appear on the emulated text screen (the horrid-looking box below with all the green @ symbols).
If you're familiar with the 6809 hopefully the rest is pretty self-explanatory. There are a few short programs included to help you along (move your pointer to Examples).
If you know some other machine language than the 6809, then it should be easy to pick up using the documentation here. A reference book wouldn't go amiss though.
Even if you know nothing of machine language, try having a go anyway. A grounding in some other programming language will certainly help. Along with one or more reference books or instructional vidoes. But seriously, the best introduction to assembly language I've seen on Youtube is Computerphile:- Game Physics (in Assembler), which uses the 68000 CPU.
Motorola launched its advanced 8-bit 6809 in 1977. It was a successor to the 6800 popular in embedded systems, and was mostly source-code compatible with it while offering many extra features. Due mainly to its late arrival it was never as popular as the 6502 and Z80 micros, but it could be found in the Dragon and Tandy Coco home Computers, as well as in less visible platforms such as the Vectrex console and several arcade cabinets including Defender.
The 6809 has two 8-bit accumulators (A & B), two 16-bit index registers (X & Y), and two 16-bit stack pointers (U & S) which can double as index registers. All the 8 and 16-bit user registers offer Load, Store, and Compare (fully signed) instructions across the four main addressing modes (Immediate, Direct Paged, Direct Extended, and Indexed).
The 8-bit accumulators have the usual set of one and two operand arithmetic and logical instructions. They can be combined into the 16-bit D register which has basic instructions for Addition and Subtraction, and also is the destination for the unsigned Multiply of A & B.
There are 16 different conditional branches which can all have either 8 or 16 bit offsets, reaching any point in memory. Subroutines can be Branched to as well as Jumped to. The indexed addressing mode includes a mode with an offset from the Program Counter (8 or 16-bit), thus there is no barrier to writing fully position independent code.
System registers are the Condition Codes (CC), Program Counter (PC) and the Direct Page register (DP). The DP provides the high 8 bits for an address specified in a single byte in Direct Paged addressing mode. The CC can have any or all bits set or reset at once with the ORCC and ANDCC immediate mode instructions. Otherwise no instructions are provided for manipulating the system registers directly. The Transfer and Exchange instructions must be used instead, which work on any pair of registers the same size. The User (U) and System (S) stacks can have any combination of registers Pushed or Pulled in a single instruction. Subroutine return addresses and interrupts use the System stack only, the User stack has no system function.
As well as the standard Interrupt (IRQ) and Non-maskable Interrupt (NMI) there is the Fast Interrupt (FIRQ) which gives faster response by only stacking the CC. There are three Software Interrupts with their own user-definable vectors.
Indexed addressing is very flexible, working across all four index registers with options for constant offsets (5, 8, or 16-bit), accumulator offsets (A, B or D), and automatic post-increment and pre-decrement (by 1 or 2). All indexed modes can optionally be made Indirect, where the operand provides the address of the true operand. PC relative comes under the Indexed mode umbrella so is available with indirection, and there's also a plain address Indirect mode. The Load Effective Address is used for initialising pointers to memory objects, or for performing simple arithmetic on index registers. It calculates the address of the operand as normal, but instead of loading a value from the address loads the address itself.
Altogether the 6809 is a flexible and powerful programming platform that is a pleasure to use. Its weaknesses are its relatively few registers, and low clock speed and good but sub-optimal efficiency.