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Z80 microcomputer

This microcomputer system combines a vintage Z80 microprocessor with a modern ATMEGA328P microcontroller.

nigelhunternigel.hunter
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  • Description
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  • Logs 2
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Z80 ATMEGA 328P BBCBASIC

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Z80 computers

Computers using or emulating z80

Z80

Projects involving Z80 microprocessors

This project was created on 02/24/2014 and last updated 11 years ago.

Description

A vintage Z80 CPU forms the core of the system. However, it uses a modern ATMEGA328P microcontroller (running the Arduino boot loader and my own custom Z80/ATMEGA interface routines) to provide most of the I/O capability.
An additional ATMEGA328P is used to provide a composite video output (using Grant Searle’s design) which drives a video converter so that a VGA monitor can be used.
The Z80 runs a custom BIOS which fits into a very small portion of the 8K EEPROM. The remainder of the memory map is occupied by 56KB of RAM.
Various I/O calls have been implemented including writing to the video interface and reading characters from a serial terminal. I’m still deciding how I’ll interface the system to a keyboard.
The Z80 BIOS provides access to the SD card reader via the ATMEGA microcontroller.
NASCOM 8K BASIC can be loaded from the SD card but my preference is the superior Z80 version of BBC BASIC, which was created using a series of source files kindly provided by the author.

Project Logs
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  • PS2 keyboard driver module

    nigel.hunter • 05/09/2014 at 17:18 • 0 comments

    I found one of these on eBay the other day

    http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/121126647632?ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1439.l2649

    Just connect your PS2 keyboard to it and then you get serial and parallel outputs related to the keys that you press.  I'd thought about building my own interface, which would be pretty simple to do, but this seems like it will do the job.

    Less than £3 delivered.  Ordered.

    I'll connect it to my Arduino Uno first to see what it sends out.

  • Bluetooth keyboard

    nigel.hunter • 04/30/2014 at 17:19 • 0 comments

    I bought one of those nice cheap Bluetooth keyboards and was planning on using it with an HC-05 Bluetooth module.  However, although the keyboard works fine with other things, the HC-05 does not work with keyboards, regardless of what the seller claimed.

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John Smith wrote 07/31/2020 at 06:46 • point

Hi Nigel. Could you please share schematics?

  Are you sure? yes | no

Jonathan wrote 08/31/2017 at 12:35 • point

Am currently looking to add an Arduino Nano to my Z80 SBC to provide I2C and SPI interfaces - would love to see the files for this project if they're available?

  Are you sure? yes | no

Dr PEKER wrote 04/11/2017 at 02:03 • point

where is the files?

  Are you sure? yes | no

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