Category Archives: DrACo/Z80

Putting the “Basic” back in BASIC

Posted on 2008-08-29 by M. Eric Carr

I found a cool Z80 simulator suite — with a lot of useful bells and whistles. It has an assembler, disassembler, memory editor, simulated peripherals, and a very intuitive and complete interface: you can look right into the heart of … Continue reading →

Posted in Coding, DrACo/Z80, Drexel | 4 Comments

9 MHz!

Posted on 2008-08-27 by M. Eric Carr

More progress on the Z80 computer: * The computer core (processor, memory, etc) was transferred piece by piece from the solderless breadboard to a wire-wrapped version.* Termination of the data and address busses was added (1K resistors to ground)* A … Continue reading →

Posted in Digital, DrACo/Z80, Drexel | Leave a comment

It works!

Posted on 2008-08-21 by M. Eric Carr

After a bit of debugging (some PIC code corrections, some VB code corrections, and finally tracking down a missing direction-pin wire), the Z80 computer is executing code! I wrote a short test program to compute Fibonacci numbers, and it ran … Continue reading →

Posted in Digital, DrACo/Z80, Drexel | Leave a comment

Plus ça change…

Posted on 2008-07-17 by M. Eric Carr

…plus ça ne change pas. Or so they say, anyway — but the design of this computer has certainly changed. The changes are for the better, though: the core (which will be constructed by the students) has been greatly simplified, … Continue reading →

Posted in Digital, DrACo/Z80, Drexel, PIC Microcontrollers | Leave a comment