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Master or Slave interface?

A project log for STEbus Z8000

Interfacing an existing Z8000 design to the STEbus

keithKeith 09/15/2025 at 15:480 Comments

Someone has recreated the Trump card using a CPLD for all the glue logic. Awesome! 

The Trump card is an 8-bit ISA bus slave card, similar to BBC micro second processors. 

It does depend on a PC-compatible machine feeding it the code to boot up, and act as a terminal. This will need some direct I/O access, which won't be allowed on any modern version of Windows. I think we are looking at MSDOS level programs. The software disks contain binary executables, so it unlikely to work as a standalone board. It will have to run as part of a PC system. I have an old PC-type single-board computer rescued from a skip, but I don't know if it works. It will take some effort to find a VGA monitor, get it running MSDOS, and talking to the trump card.

The Trump card could be made an STEbus slave fairly easily, but will need a PC-compatible STEbus master to run the cross-compilers and support software. I have one, but again I have not got it running yet. 

It should be possible to run the cross assemblers/compilers in Wine on Linux, but not the I/O based communications of course. Maybe the Trump card could be modified to use a USB slave, and the software hacked to use USB comms, but that's more work than I have time for right now.

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