The Adventure Begins (Diving Deeper into the Z80)

Started by MicroNut, May 04, 2025, 10:04 PM

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MicroNut

I decided this weekend to jump back into my electronics hobby by making my own version of the Z80 for my FPGAs. I have found a site that already has made one by reverse engineering the Z80 die. The site highlights some logic and also has schematics of the logic.

It is my intent to use a Logic simulator called Digital to copy these schematics into it. The simulator can generate truth tables, Verilog and VHDL code. It also runs test scripts. Using the simulator I will be able to test the validity of the schematics and to better understand the logic. Once that is done I will make the FPGA softcore with what I learned.

Eventually I will make a minimal operating system on my DE10-Lite and use a serial terminal to communicate with it.

As I go through this I plan to document my findings. I remember having the book ZX81 Explorer's Guide which was a very good book and was a bit light hearted as well. I found that refreshing so I'm writing it in the same style. I even had AI generate cover art for it which I attached.

I have a Github account and will post everything as I go along with this project.

EDIT: Changed the cover art to something I liked more.


MicroNut

Just got my Github site up. The guide only has a forward, introduction and chapter holders as an outline. This will probably change somewhat as I go through my research.

granz

Quote from: MicroNut on May 07, 2025, 05:36 PMJust got my Github site up. The guide only has a forward, introduction and chapter holders as an outline. This will probably change somewhat as I go through my research.
I got a 404 error.

Is your page open to people who are not logged in? I had something like that happen to my son, and it turned out that he had something marked so that only people who were logged in could see it.

MicroNut

I had the repository set to private. I changed it to public. I then tried it without logging in and it works for me.

granz

I was able to get in, and read now, thanks.

It's looking pretty good, so far.