[HN Gopher] Build Your Own Z80 Computer: Design Guidelines and A...
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Build Your Own Z80 Computer: Design Guidelines and Application
(1981)
Author : mariuz
Score : 81 points
Date : 2024-08-30 08:00 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (archive.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (archive.org)
| hggh wrote:
| (1981)
| rnewme wrote:
| Interesting, I was just yesterday researching more about Z80
| after seeing some cheap refub chips on AliExpress. I might order
| some and try to follow this guide
| stevekemp wrote:
| If you visit https://www.tindie.com/ you can search for either
| "Z80" or "CP/M" and find a lot of single-board computers that
| are available as kits.
|
| RC2014 is the most popular, a modular system with lots of
| options, but that's overkill and more expensive than it needs
| to be if you just wanna get a simple system working and running
| your own code.
| linker3000 wrote:
| Check out http://www.searle.wales/
| Luc wrote:
| Written by Steve Ciarcia, it's indeed a very good book.
|
| If I am not mistaken a Youtuber made this popular again so second
| hand copies go for $100+.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Grab the PDF while you can....
| acegopher wrote:
| What YouTuber? I'd like to subscribe.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Just one chapter in -- and I already love the linear power
| supply.
| passthejoe wrote:
| I used to have this book and loved it. Kid me could never have
| built this. Adult me couldn't either, but the idea that somebody
| could was pretty extraordinary.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| Steve Ciarcia's Byte magazine articles are a great read (in fact
| all of Byte was great) - being enthralled by them as a kid but
| not understanding them probably had a large effect on me choosing
| to study electronics.
|
| https://archive.org/details/BYTE-MAGAZINE-COMPLETE
| jdblair wrote:
| same here!
| upon_drumhead wrote:
| From the comments on the archive.org details, that archive is
| missing years, the original source of the scans is
| http://vintageapple.org/byte , and it has all of them
| analog31 wrote:
| My mom subscribed to Byte magazine, and Ciarcia's articles were
| inspiring to me too. That, and _Goedel, Escher, Bach_. Oddly
| enough I ended up at a college with no engineering program, but
| my physics professor was an electronics expert, and I majored
| in math and physics. Since then, virtually everything I 've
| done with physics has involved electronics and computers, often
| working together.
|
| Radio Shack had a book on the Z80, that I think was the same as
| the Howard Sams book, but with a different cover. It was so
| clearly written, that even to this day, my ability to
| conceptualize the innards of computers is strongly biased by
| the Z80 architecture.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Before the Speccy got famous, I remember seeing such kind of Z80
| building kits on electronic hardware stores on my small
| Portuguese town.
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| I subscribed to Byte magazine when I was in high school and
| college, and I owned this book. When I graduated with a BSEE
| degree in 1985, I designed my own Z80 computer but used this book
| as a reference. However, just before I started buying parts, I
| realized a 68000 microprocessor wasn't that much more expensive,
| so I went that route and built it. I never did anything with the
| it, but it was a fun exercise.
| wslh wrote:
| I imagine you booted it at least with some small code? The 68k
| assembly is nice.
| nullsmack wrote:
| Oh wow this brings back memories.. I used to check this book out
| from a local library from time to time and daydream about
| building a computer. It would've been outdated already even then,
| but the idea appealed to me anyways.
| fuzztester wrote:
| Does anyone build their own computers from motherboards and other
| electronic components these days, say by soldering them on, or
| connecting them into slots?
|
| I don't have the background to do it, and not planning to, but am
| just interested to know. I used to read the Steve Ciarcia's
| Circuit Cellar column in BYTE long ago, just out of interest,
| even though I didn't have any knowledge of electronics.
| linker3000 wrote:
| Hoo yep:
|
| https://z80kits.com/product-category/basekits/
|
| https://smallcomputercentral.com/
|
| https://j4f.info/start
|
| http://www.searle.wales/
|
| To name a few.
|
| Steve's book is fascinating and a good intro to the
| architecture, but some of the chips used are quite obsolete
| (even more so that the mainstream obsolete ones!) and so
| building a computer from that book would be very challenging.
| whartung wrote:
| I lament that he didn't spend a chapter or two on a floppy disk
| and floppy disk controller. I would like to see a detail treatise
| on that, I've never seen one.
|
| Maybe its straightforward, drag and drop from the FDC data sheet
| into a bit of code. Then again, maybe not.
|
| Even when he did the SB-180, his 64180 based SBC, it has an FDC,
| but he does not talk of it much.
|
| He also did some articles on an 8088 computer. This was
| interesting because it came out in that seeming millisecond of
| time between CP/M and MS-DOS, but before "PC Compatible". His
| computer could run MS-DOS (or, I reckon, CP/M-86), but it was not
| a PC Compatible.
|
| But it was just a couple of articles, not a book like this was.
|
| Mind, he spent much of his time in the controller world, not
| really the desktop world. The SB-180 was a bit of a anomaly in
| that sense, as it was more of a full desktop machine than most of
| his other work.
| greenbit wrote:
| FDCs were tricky things. When reading you had to pick up a byte
| every 8 usec, when writing you had to be ready with the next
| byte in the same amount of time, and a whole sector's worth
| would need to be dealt with without interruption. (Idk if the
| number was exactly 8 usec, but it was in that neighborhood)
|
| Most of the early 8 bit micros couldn't service an IRQ fast
| enough to keep up, so you'd be more likely to see a polling
| loop, but even those had to cut things tight. I saw some 1.7MHz
| 6809 code that could just about do it. Not sure how the old
| TRS80s dealt, maybe LDI type things? I know the IBM 5150 relied
| on a DMA chip to shift the sectors to/from disk. Would be fun
| to find out what the old S-100 systems did.
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