Z80 end of the road

P

P. Short

Super Moderator
Staff member
Apparently Zilog has announced that they are discontinuing the Z80 microprocessor after almost five decades. It might be fun to try and make a pixel controller using that processor, much as a waste of time as that would be.
 
The processor has 64K address space. The systems that we designed in the late 1970's had a 2K boot PROM, a 6845 CRT controller using some address space for character storage, and memory implemented using 4Kx1 DRAMs. They also had a keyboard (no mouse, I'm not sure if they had been invented by then), a 5-1/4" floppy drive using a controller that was designed in-house, and later on small-capacity hard drives from Micropolis/Seagate/Shugart (I think the former, but I'm not sure any more).
 
I've got a couple Timex Sinclair computers that use the Z80 if you want to mess with them.... They're in pristine condition -- original boxes!!!
 
Not that I'm going to do anything immediately, but the other processor that I would want to play with is the CDP1802, the RCA COSMAC. It's pretty slow, but radiation-hardened version(s) made their way to the planet Jupiter aboard the Galileo probe, and allegedly in the Hubble space telescope.
 
When I used them, the biggest EPROM we could get was 32K and the peripherals were stuck in a 16KB space. We used these in the colecovison game system and had a few of the Z80 SOC devices in the Adam computer (built in prom space). Anyone still have a commodore VIC or C64. The Rockwell 6502 was a workhorse CPU.
 
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