Out of curiosity, have you thought about trying to port "real" games over to it, as in running a ROM of something commercially released? This is already really cool, but it would be nerd-cred-for-life cool if you could say "Oh, you have a gameboy? Yeah, I built my own."
I was doing a little bit of Z80 work a while back, but I didn't particularly seem to appreciate its design (compared to say MIPS). Why do you think it's beautifully designed?
Admittedly, I do not have a lot of experience in other CPUs, but to me its just the way its designed. A simple syntax for assembly and the way it maps to byte values is clever. It doesn't require a lot of work to make things happen, ie "hacks" for interacting with IO. I also like how there is a separate IO bus from the data bus, which means IO doesn't take up memory. The register naming convention is simple, and having "alternate" registers is cool.
Out of curiosity, have you thought about trying to port "real" games over to it, as in running a ROM of something commercially released? This is already really cool, but it would be nerd-cred-for-life cool if you could say "Oh, you have a gameboy? Yeah, I built my own."
I love that there is a group of people who still love the Z80!
Such a beautifully designed chip.
I was doing a little bit of Z80 work a while back, but I didn't particularly seem to appreciate its design (compared to say MIPS). Why do you think it's beautifully designed?
Admittedly, I do not have a lot of experience in other CPUs, but to me its just the way its designed. A simple syntax for assembly and the way it maps to byte values is clever. It doesn't require a lot of work to make things happen, ie "hacks" for interacting with IO. I also like how there is a separate IO bus from the data bus, which means IO doesn't take up memory. The register naming convention is simple, and having "alternate" registers is cool.
Just seems simple and cool to me.
You can hand clock a Z80. There is a certain magic to that.
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I used to do Z80 programming in the TI-82 in high school back in 2002. This seeing the code in the article brought back some good memories.