A box from Jameco with a few Z80 chips, some SRAM and some EEPROMS showed up on my doorstep yesterday morning. Yep, I'm going to take a stab at doing a homebrew Z80 based machine. :-)<p>Assuming I get something useful built, I guess I'll try to get CP/M up and running on it (it's that or try writing my own OS, I suppose), so this may be very useful.<p>I know what you're thinking... "why, for the love of FSM, would you build an 8-bit microcomputer today?" In my case, it's partly for fun, and largely for educational purposes. I've been a software guy my whole career, and while I've dabbled with some hobby electronics stuff, I never really learned a lot about the low level computer architecture stuff, and the hardware aspects. So I want the understanding that comes from literally building a machine from IC's. I want to understand more about how the data bus works, how I/O works, the timer for the CPU, interrupts at the hardware level etc.<p>And interestingly enough... I've done some searching and have found some cool projects where people have built Z80 machines and added things like USB support, PS/2 keyboard support, SD card interfaces, etc. Not bad for a CPU that's 30 some odd years out of date.
The Research Machines 380Z (<a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/13/archaeologic_the_research_machines_380z_story/" rel="nofollow">http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/13/archaeologic_the_res...</a>) is the machine I'll always (happily) associate with CP/M. That article says "even in 1982, the 380Z was a veteran", and that was still a couple of years before I ever got to use one. My school had two of them in the mid-to-late-80s that had long been seen as obsolete (having been replaced by a room of BBC micros) but were still sitting around and that nobody else wanted to use. I used to write text adventures and tank games on them and I had a plan for a crude version of Lords of Midnight that I'm pretty sure never got anywhere. I still have the floppies, though I very much doubt if they'd read any more.<p>Love the industrial design of the 380Z as well.
Toward the end of my CP/M days (~1986/87) we had debugger named DSD for Dynamic Screen Debugger. Of course we take our modern IDEs for granted, but back then, being able to step one instruction to the next on screen, with the current instruction highlighted in inverse video, and all the registers and flags displayed in a box in one corner of the screen was pretty unbelievable.
Some of the 5.25' floppy drives for the 8-bit Atari [1] had the Z80 CPU and it was possible to run the CP/M on it. The Atari was serving as a terminal for its own disk drive.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.retrobits.net/atari/indus.shtml" rel="nofollow">http://www.retrobits.net/atari/indus.shtml</a>
I used to develop applications in COBOL for CP/M microcomputers, then Dataflex and then, for a short time, Turbo Pascal. Some customers ran inventory and accounts receivable applications off floppy disks. Lots of manual data entry too.
Another alternative to building under an emulated CP/M environment is to cross-build directly under Linux. If you need something that can assemble code intended for LASM you can use this: <a href="http://www.insentricity.com/a.cl/259" rel="nofollow">http://www.insentricity.com/a.cl/259</a>
I used to run CP/M on a couple of Vector Graphics MZ S-100 computers back in the early 80's. I don't remember a ton about it, but I think I loved it. Nostalgia is like that.
I still have an Intertec Superbrain here. The looks of it alone make it worth keeping. It needs repairs, but I'm afraid the screen is dead (has stains on it), and then it's probably over. I would like to be able to copy the 5.25" disks, but how? I probably need an old DOS machine which can write to 3.5" floppy or something... Hobby project for later! ;-)<p>Back in the 80s this was my machine, for Wordstart, Dbase II and Turbo Pascal mostly. I was one of the only kids with such a machine, although soon the PC would take over.
I remember ZX Spectrum +3 having support for CP/M.<p>Could only see it at a friend's place, given that I only had access to a Timex 2068 and a ZX Spectrum 48K, none of them suitable for CP/M.