The purpose of this blog is to document a project that is
probably 30 years in the making. The inspiration comes from “Build Your Own Z80 Computer” written by Steve Ciarcia back
in 1981. At the time, I was an electronic engineering student and I dabbled
with a simple Intel 8085 board in a few labs I had. I was fascinated by the whole computer concept
where you can program a chip to do something. I purchased Steve's book to give
me ideas on how to build my own system. I actually ended up building some of
the components from the book on Radio Shack perf-boards. From what I remember,
one board had the Z80, clock, reset circuit, and address and data buffers.
Another board had EPROM, RAM, and the address decoders. A third had a simple
I/O system consisting of some switches and LEDs. All the boards were wired
point to point style and were plugged into a chassis that had a series of edge
connectors wired in parallel. It was kind of messy but I was able to get small
programs running on it so I guess it was a success.
What I want to do here is to build a retro Z80 CPU with some
21st century components. The goal is to eliminate some of the problems I had
back in the early 80's by using modern components. I guess I could just use an
ARM processor and eliminate everything but that's not what I'm after here. I
want to use the project for experimenting and general playing around with an
early processor.
The various blog entries to follow will describe the part of
the circuit being designed, what the hurdles were "back in the day",
and how they will be eliminated using newer technology. I'm sure there will be
better ways to do things but I'm doing things this way because it's the way I
want to do it.......so there!
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