Z80

Last week I was at the UK's first Vintage Computing Festival and picked up a new keyboard membrane for my ZX Spectrum and a replacement metal cover as the one that was on the speccy when I got it was a bit corroded. I took the opportunity to do another couple of jobs on the old computer.

I chose to keep the peripheral count low on this system, this was for several reasons;

• Less to debug
• Less to build (so faster, very important to stop me adding "features"!)
• Provides a better system for experimenting (more IO address free)

The memory part of my Mark 2 system is extremely simple. There are two 32K SRAM chips (actually FRAM because I had them lying around, but there isn't any significant difference in this application). These are selected with the logical OR of the MREQ signal and A15 (or inverse of A15 for the upper chip). Because the boot code for the Z80 is held by the PIC and the PIC can control the whole address bus while it holds the Z80 in reset the boot code is written to normal RAM after power-on. This provides the advantage of less decode logic, and no ROM chip, as well as allowing the whole of the memory space to be used by whatever application is running as there are no "unwriteable" regions.

I've actually started building this Z80 project already, so this one might get to do something more than just a debug pattern on some LEDs. The design for this is fairly minimal and is based around two main factors; stuff I've done or planned before (so understand to a certain degree) and parts I have lying around. As such the components might be a bit odd, and possibly unavailable (sorry).

Booting computers is an age old problem. It seems like an easy task to you, just press the button, but the software and hardware involved is often a bit of a hack. When you start a Z80 processor (ignoring reset hold times and clock stability for the moment) it will try to load an instruction from memory address 0, execute it then move on. So the traditional way Z80 micro computers (like the Sinclair ZX Spectrum and the Amstrad NC100, to name a couple I own) are built is with a ROM chip at the bottom of the address space with some kind of operating system on it, e.g. a BASIC interpreter.