Emulators and neatened wiring

Tuesday, 12th August 2008

I've decided to switch to a regular 10MHz Z80 rather than a Z180, given the difficulty of using an SDIP 64. I now have a DIP 40 Z80 ready for use, but as I don't have the programmer for the Flash chip (which will hold the OS) there's not much I can do with it physically. I have therefore cobbled together a basic emulator to help develop some of the software beforehand.

To cut hardware costs I'm going to try and handle input in software. One bit of hardware I'm planning on having is an eight-bit open collector I/O port. Open collector pins float high in their reset state, and any device connected to the pin can drive it low. AT devices (keyboard and mouse) use this type of electrical connection, as does the I²C bus and the TI calculator link port. I can use up the eight pins easily - two pins per AT device (keyboard and mouse) makes four, two pins for the I²C bus and two pins for a TI calculator link port.

The I²C bus I mentioned above is a simple way to enhance the computer once built. There will be one device permanently attached to the bus, a DS1307 real-time clock, which will be used to provide time-keeping functions for the OS as well as generating periodic interrupts (the chip could be configured to trigger an interrupt 100 times a second, useful for timing game logic). I could then leave empty space on the circuit board to add other I²C devices over time, or have a socket on the case that could be used to plug in additional I²C modules.

Now that I have some more tools, namely a desoldering pump, I tidied up the horrible hack job I'd done on the graphical LCD (replacing the multiple wires with a single pin header).

Yes, still the PICAXE here, but I'm using its 256 byte EEPROM to store a 32×64 pixel image of Sonic that is repeated four times horizontally.

I'm still not sure what I'm doing with regards to memory or storage. I'm still working on the simple assumption that ROM is 32KB ($0000..$7FFF) and RAM is 32KB ($8000..$FFFF) but this wastes a lot of memory and isn't very flexible at all. I've planned a bank-switching MMU, but as this will require at least four registers to store what appears in each of the four 16KB windows it will end up being physically very large and painful to wire.

As for storage, I have no idea. I have some 32KB I²C EEPROMs, but 32KB isn't exactly very large. Alternatively, I have an old 512MB SD card, and could try talking to it over bit-banged SPI. (SD cards use 3.3V, though, which complicates matters - not to mention that bit-banged SPI is going to be a little sluggish). I also have a USB module which can talk to USB mass storage devices over a serial connection, so maybe I should add a UART to the project. Adding a fully-blown USB module (which also plays WMA, MP3 and MIDI files) to such an otherwise low-tech computer feels like heresy, though.