PZ80emu - The PZ80 Machine Emulator

While I was messing about with the PZ80 schematics, I realized that I really needed an environment where I could write and run test code for the ROM monitor before I went burning EEPROMs.  I searched around for a few days for a suitable machine emulator, but ran into severe bugs with those that I found that weren't tailor made as CP/M emulators.

While I was searching around, I came across the website of Marat Fayzullin, who wrote a fantastic HOWTO on writing computer emulators:

http://fms.komkon.org/EMUL8/HOWTO.html

The PZ80emu is far from complete, but so far is able to load ROMs compiled by z80asm on my Mac.  It executes them quite well from what I tell, as long as I don't use any of the instructions I haven't implemented yet.  I have also implemented a very basic NCurses interface, mostly because I've never coded with NCurses before and thought it would be fun.

The code is most definitely alpha, and is incomplete, but anyone interested in hacking on what I've got so far is more than welcome.  I will certainly keep the Git repository up to date as I hack on the code, and will gladly accept pull requests.

https://github.com/protoCall7/PZ80emu

PZ80 - Taking Another Step Back

After re-designing the bus buffering on the Z80, the project kind of stalled for me.  I ordered some parts now and again, and tweaked the schematics, but didn't make a whole lot of progress.

Feeling that this was an unacceptable state of affairs, I decided to take a step backwards and simplify my circuit.  What I would up with was the Z80 being fed with power from my bench supply, the entire data bus pulled low with 1K resistors, a few pull-up/down resistors on the control lines, and the oscillator.  Once that was set up, I connected my handy-dandy OpenBench Logic Analyzer up to the first 7 bits of the address bus, and to the clock signal, and fired everything up:

Admittedly, it didn't look like that on the first shot, but after some troubleshooting, it turned out to be user error in the configuration of the logic analyzer, not in the board itself.

The pattern above is caused by the address bus doing a binary countup.  The Z80 instruction set has the NOP instruction as 0x00.  By pulling the entire data bus low and resetting the CPU, the machine will start at address 0x0000, read a "NOP" from the data bus, increment the counter to 0x0001, read another "NOP", and repeat.  Since the current address in the program counter is displayed in binary on the address bus, the logic analyzer displays the above pattern when the board runs.

As far as farther incarnations of the design, I have decided to temporarily build a "MK1" type design, utilizing 32k of ROM and 32k of RAM.  It will use an SIO and a MAX-232 for serial communication, and I would like to work on implementing an IDE interface using CF storage (but this might wait).  This design won't be adequate to run CP/M, but will give me a working platform to start developing the ROM monitor, which will be an integral part of boot loading CP/M in the MK2 design, which would integrate a memory bank switching scheme to swap the ROM out for a 32k RAM chip as a part of the CP/M load process.

I haven't yet decided whether to implement the Z80-CTC for interrupt control + Z80-SIO timing in the MK1 design, or just use another full can oscillator to give a fixed serial baud rate, but I will be going with one of those two methods.

In the mean time, I have been working on putting together a machine emulator in C, as I haven't found anything suitable to write and debug my ROM monitor with, but that's a subject for another post.

One last note, I finally decided on a name - The PZ80!

Commodore Build

A few months back, I ran across a post over at Hackaday telling the story of a Kickstarter trying to put the original C64 injection molds back into production making enclosures.

http://hackaday.com/2015/03/11/hackaday-retro-edition-a-new-commodore-64-case/

I never had the pleasure of owning a C64, but I always wanted to play around with one, especially with some of the MIDI sequencer software floating around.  I couldn't help myself, and decided to back the Kickstarter and get one of the enclosures.  After hearing a horror story about a factory fire from the Kickstarter update, I started to doubt that the enclosure would ever show up... Until today today, when I received a mysterious package containing...

I am still working on sourcing a board, but I have a line on several non-functional ones.  I'm hoping that with a couple bad boards, the original schematics, and some soldering iron time, that I can cobble together a working C64.  Having the enclosures sitting here certainly makes the project feel more likely to actually happen.  Stay tuned for more updates!