I’m currently enjoying the pleasant and instructional reading of your book and I’ll be looking for the ones about writing codes and floppy controllers. As this computer is designed in the old way and will be able to run CP/M, I wonder if it would be in the line to let it be able to support 8” floppy drivers as well. It would be fascinating, I believe, to use such disks beyond the other formats. I’m not expert on FM and MFM circuit over the various type differences and compatibility, so forgive me if it might be impossible.
All you need to do to run 8" drives is configure the FDC appropriately. The only real difference is in the sector sizes and clock speeds. These are set in the code and FDC status register so no this design will already support 8" drives. To make best use of an 8" drive the clock to the FDC should be 2MHz rather than 1MHz but as this is a /2 then it can easily be achieved by halving the clock divider ratio. The rest is the same.
Yeah, I do agree that the work is really impressive. But generally it's quite astonishing that someone messes with 8bit systems that are quite the certain headache to program and keep software in a good shape. Also as far as I understand Z80 "computers" didn't have proper "video accelerators" for rich graphics, the whole niche was gobbled by the Commodore squad.
Z80 computers are exceptionally easy to program and most video arcade games used Z80 processors so I have no idea what your comment is based on. I also think you may have totally missed the point of this project so maybe your 'understanding' is incorrect.
@@ran2wild370 The ZX Spectrum had a different design philosophy, intended for the UK market just after a long period of industrial decline. Everything was about price. The Spectrum design is mainly a re-use of ZX80/81 code with enhancements and accepts many technical compromises in the architecture as a fair trade off, in order to make a very compact, low cost computer. At the time, the 16K version cost just 99.00. Which for a colour (8 colour plus two shades) computer with high res (for the time) graphics, was an unbelievable price point. The Commodore 64 was appx 300.00 when released for comparison, likewise the BBC etc. Thus you cannot compare the two architectures as representative of the state of the art for each CPU type. The Z80 is a high performance CPU in fairly common use today for embedded systems, with a large number of registers that allows (in a conventional architecture) high performance code to be written. It's I/O space is completely independent of the memory map, making bank switching easier for RAM greater than 64K. It is easy to use and code for. The 6502 is similarly easy but is more limited in functionality. It does however give a reasonably good account of itself as it uses less clock cycles for instructions on average. However it is not capable of the high clock speeds of the Z80 (the Z80B I think was 8 MHz capable) The Commodore 64 used a custom processor, the 6510, and not the 6502 which would perhaps have dealt with some of the shortcomings of the vanilla 6502 for that application. I believe the Z80 could makes a good trainer today for anyone that wants to learn techniques of assembly programming, as it gives a good introduction to computer architecture and embedded system firmware etc. without facing the overwhelming complexity of 32 bit arm SoC's etc. right out of the gate.
![A new OS for the Z80! [Open Source][Zeal 8-bit OS]](/img/n.gif)
impressive work. Happy 2024!
I’m currently enjoying the pleasant and instructional reading of your book and I’ll be looking for the ones about writing codes and floppy controllers. As this computer is designed in the old way and will be able to run CP/M, I wonder if it would be in the line to let it be able to support 8” floppy drivers as well. It would be fascinating, I believe, to use such disks beyond the other formats. I’m not expert on FM and MFM circuit over the various type differences and compatibility, so forgive me if it might be impossible.
All you need to do to run 8" drives is configure the FDC appropriately. The only real difference is in the sector sizes and clock speeds. These are set in the code and FDC status register so no this design will already support 8" drives. To make best use of an 8" drive the clock to the FDC should be 2MHz rather than 1MHz but as this is a /2 then it can easily be achieved by halving the clock divider ratio. The rest is the same.
I have 3 shugart 800s that i been saving for a day that never came. My electronics hoarding has finally paid off
Hello hope all is good I’m wondering how much would a creed teleprinter cost? Thank you
Yeah, I do agree that the work is really impressive. But generally it's quite astonishing that someone messes with 8bit systems that are quite the certain headache to program and keep software in a good shape. Also as far as I understand Z80 "computers" didn't have proper "video accelerators" for rich graphics, the whole niche was gobbled by the Commodore squad.
Z80 computers are exceptionally easy to program and most video arcade games used Z80 processors so I have no idea what your comment is based on. I also think you may have totally missed the point of this project so maybe your 'understanding' is incorrect.
@@JerryWalker001:-) Well I was just comparing videos with Commdores and Spectrums :-))
@@ran2wild370 The ZX Spectrum had a different design philosophy, intended for the UK market just after a long period of industrial decline. Everything was about price. The Spectrum design is mainly a re-use of ZX80/81 code with enhancements and accepts many technical compromises in the architecture as a fair trade off, in order to make a very compact, low cost computer. At the time, the 16K version cost just 99.00. Which for a colour (8 colour plus two shades) computer with high res (for the time) graphics, was an unbelievable price point. The Commodore 64 was appx 300.00 when released for comparison, likewise the BBC etc.
Thus you cannot compare the two architectures as representative of the state of the art for each CPU type. The Z80 is a high performance CPU in fairly common use today for embedded systems, with a large number of registers that allows (in a conventional architecture) high performance code to be written. It's I/O space is completely independent of the memory map, making bank switching easier for RAM greater than 64K. It is easy to use and code for.
The 6502 is similarly easy but is more limited in functionality. It does however give a reasonably good account of itself as it uses less clock cycles for instructions on average. However it is not capable of the high clock speeds of the Z80 (the Z80B I think was 8 MHz capable) The Commodore 64 used a custom processor, the 6510, and not the 6502 which would perhaps have dealt with some of the shortcomings of the vanilla 6502 for that application.
I believe the Z80 could makes a good trainer today for anyone that wants to learn techniques of assembly programming, as it gives a good introduction to computer architecture and embedded system firmware etc. without facing the overwhelming complexity of 32 bit arm SoC's etc. right out of the gate.