I love that this site has an Easter egg if left idle long enough.
michalpleban · 19h ago
How much room is there for a custom PCB? I'm a 6502 guy so I would like to keep the case but put something there with my favorite CPU.
rollcat · 18h ago
I've learned Z80 and 8051 a decade or two ago, and then forgot everything. Honestly both were easy to pick up, but I assume you're opinionated and/or an expert?
Anything in particular that you like about the 6502?
PaulHoule · 14h ago
I think people like the way the 6502 wires up to peripherals. Myself I think the Z80 is much better because it has enough registers and addressing modes that you can write compilers for it. I know they had C compilers for it in 1984 because I typed in a C program for CP/M from Byte magazine and got it to run on my 6809-based TRS-80 Color Computer. Programming languages for the 6502 were usually implemented with virtual machine techniques like
because it is way faster, has a bigger address space, and has wider registers so you can do pointer math over that bigger address space unlike this turkey
A lot of people enjoyed writing assembly for the 6502 back in the day though.
pjmlp · 1h ago
UCSD Pascal was marvelous over the plain ISO Pascal from early 1970's, and the inspiration for Clascal and Object Pascal at Apple, that eventually was embraced by Borland, and a few competitors like TMT that wanted a piece of the Pascal pie on PCs.
And the Constellation OS from Corvus Systems.
C compilers on Z80, at least on Spectrums were really lousy in terms of code generation, plus the whole dev experience unless on a +3 A with drive, those kind of machines were designed for a BASIC interpreter + Assembly.
rollcat · 5h ago
eZ80 looks cool. Indeed looks like an interesting mcu to build a tiny general-purpose computer from scratch. (Somehow I always found bank-switching kinda ugly, address space is better when there's more of it.)
I find it fascinating how these 70s/80s microprocessors still keep getting pushed with backward-compatible updates. (Most notably, x86-64.)
Anything in particular that you like about the 6502?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWEET16
or the truly atrocious
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UCSD_Pascal
which was one reason a generation of programmers hated PASCAL with a passion and declared you could pry BASIC from our cold dead hands.
Myself I'd want to hollow it out and put something based on
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zilog_eZ80
because it is way faster, has a bigger address space, and has wider registers so you can do pointer math over that bigger address space unlike this turkey
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WDC_65C816
A lot of people enjoyed writing assembly for the 6502 back in the day though.
And the Constellation OS from Corvus Systems.
C compilers on Z80, at least on Spectrums were really lousy in terms of code generation, plus the whole dev experience unless on a +3 A with drive, those kind of machines were designed for a BASIC interpreter + Assembly.
I find it fascinating how these 70s/80s microprocessors still keep getting pushed with backward-compatible updates. (Most notably, x86-64.)