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Luke James is a freelance writer and journalist.\u00a0 Although his background is in legal, he has a personal interest in all things tech, especially hardware and microelectronics, and anything regulatory.\u00a0 ","collapsible":{"enabled":true,"maxHeight":250,"readMoreText":"Read more","readLessText":"Read less"}}), "https://slice.vanilla.futurecdn.net/13-4-25/js/authorBio.js"); } else { console.error('%c FTE ','background: #9306F9; color: #ffffff','no lazy slice hydration function available'); } Luke James Social Links Navigation Contributor Luke James is a freelance writer and journalist. Although his background is in legal, he has a personal interest in all things tech, especially hardware and microelectronics, and anything regulatory.
hwertz Conversational LLM on a 64KB Z80? I bet that was a pretty sweet conversation LOL. Anyway the Z80 is a classic and it's great it's still available. Reply
roelh A Z80 can be replaced by a circuit of 60 TTL IC's, without FPGA. This includes a 640×400 VGA, in color. It runs a nice GUI, and you can build it yourself. Search: Isetta computer. AFAIK it is the first time that the Z80 was replicated by a TTL circuit. The Isetta also runs ZX Spectrum games. Reply
TheThief The Gameboy doesn't use a Z80 – it uses a Sharp SM83. The SM83 lies about halfway between the 8080 and Z80 – it is also compatible with the 8080, has some extended opcodes from the Z80 but not all, doesn't have the index or shadow registers, doesn't have the DRAM refresh, etc. It does however have built in timers, and the variant in the GB has built in display and sound capabilities as well. Reply
abufrejoval My first physical encounter with computers was via Z-80 machines. A BASIC programming course in 1980 used Tandy TRS-80 machines and the first computer I owned, an Apple ] generic, even if the base architecture didn't permit every imaginable permutation… it was a battle of abstraction layers and I always aimed as high as possible there, but demanded (and checked) ultimate effiency from the compiler. And most importantly, I demanded that compilers catch all those stupid errors my fast fat fingers and my sloppy brain introduced while "speaking via the keyboard". There Turbo Pascal was both brutal and fast, Fortran and C compilers were so 'permissive', I might have failed in an IT career, but then I caught them producing assembly garbage, too. Perhaps because of that culture war, I stayed clear of writing any significant amount of assymbly code, then or ever after. But I certainly read the CP/M (Intel) assembly source code, just I read the C-source of Unix years later. I also read the assembly code that compilers produced for many years to gauge their quality (or lack thereof). As with human languages, understanding and speaking are two very distinct beasts: I clearly understand just about every Romance language ever invented much better than the Germanic variants that surround my native German, it doesn't mean I'd be ready to write contracts in each, I'd be confortable to sign: with code you not only expect it to work, but also to manage every imagined borderline condition. So in a way the Z-80 has in all likelyhood been much more of a formative experience, even if all of my (paid) IT career has been x86 and rarely below K&R or even ANSI C when writing code. Z-80 (when did it ever drop the dash?), I salute you, Federico & Masatoshi, you've done great work, thank you very much! Reply
pjmelect The good thing was that most Z80's could be overclocked from 2.5 MHz to more than 8MHz providing the memory of the computer was fast enough. try overclocking by the same percentage modern CPU's Reply
abufrejoval pjmelect said: The good thing was that most Z80's could be overclocked from 2.5 MHz to more than 8MHz providing the memory of the computer was fast enough. try overclocking by the same percentage modern CPU's That wasn't an option with the SoftCard on the Apple ] Reply
80251 I believe the Z80 was pin compatible and instruction set compatible w/Intel's 8088 and could almost be used interchangeably w/the 8088. It broke any programs that relied on timing loops being executed according to the speed of 8088 instructions though and some games would run so much faster on the Z80 as to be unplayable. Reply
ttquantia 80251 said: I believe the Z80 was pin compatible and instruction set compatible w/Intel's 8088 and could almost be used interchangeably w/the 8088. No. 8088 has the same instruction set as 8086. Reply
80251 ttquantia said: No. 8088 has the same instruction set as 8086. All three CPUs were based on the Intel 8080 because the founder of Zilog formerly worked at Intel on the 8080! Reply
ttquantia 80251 said: All three CPUs were based on the Intel 8080 because the founder of Zilog formerly worked at Intel on the 8080! Maybe, but 8086 (followed by the 8-bit variant 8088) started the so-called x86 instruction set, which you may have heard about. It is a different instruction set than Z80 and 8080. Please check before posting disinformation. Reply
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- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/zilog-z80-turns-50-as-open-source-replacement-heads-for-drop-in-dip40-silicon#main
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Informational only. No financial advice. Do your own research.