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Interrupts and the Memory Bank register (MB)

I have established that "vectors" in Heritage/1 interrupts are nothing but the actual ISR address. The reason for this dangerous scheme comes from the count of 64K interrupt "vectors" which in turn comes form the Data Bus size. 64K is too big for a real interrupt vector so I opted to make it a memory address.

But there is a problem with the Memory Bank register (MB): If a program that had switched the MB is interrupted, then the address supplied from the interrupter device will apply to the new bank and not to the intended previous one, so the need for saving the MB register before branching to the new ISR. However, this is not possible in the current architecture because MB is not connected to the D-BUS.

One solution is to simply build a path from MB to the D-BUS so we can save/restore the MB register to/from the Stack as we do with the PC. Additionally we can establish that ISRs always reside in Bank 0 so the Interrupt Controller always reset MB before passing control to the ISR.

Another solution is to re-architecture Interrupts. We can opt, for instance, to a "real" 8-bits interrupt vector leaving the remaining 8 bits for setting the MB content.

A path between MB and the D-BUS was added. Since MB is 8-bits and the Flags Register (F) is also 8 bits, I resolved to save both at the same time in a single memory (16-bits) before serving an interrupt request.