171–180 of 214 posts
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I love that there is a group of people who still love the Z80! Such a beautifully designed chip.
I was doing a little bit of Z80 work a while back, but I didn't particularly seem to appreciate its design (compared to say MIPS). Why do you think it's beautifully designed?
Oh to built 20Mhz systems again! ... no picosecond timing skews to stress over, no ground plane worries, no trace-related design rule violations, no harmonic noise issues, no dynamic bus inversions to prevent victim/attacker degradation, no thermal issues... I spend so much time debugging GHz multi-layer circuit boards that I forget how "easy" 20MHz digital circuits can be. This guy's project is truly inspiring!
At risk of being more "me too" about this, I am in awe of the hard-earned multi-disciplinary skills that went into making this. You should be proud of yourself :) Great project, and a great read.
I am proud and honestly reading all these comments of people like you saying awesome stuff and also saying this inspires them makes me even prouder :)
This is the coolest thing I've seen posted on HN in years, very cool work. I've been playing with Atari 2600 programming on and off for the past few years and it is so fun programming directly against the specific hardware. I can't help but occasionally wonder if I could piece together a similar system, but I have 0 experience with electronics. I can only imagine how satisfying it must be to actually pull it off.
Thanks a lot :) It really is super satisfying to get this far, I still turn it on sometimes just to check if it really works. And I also had zero experience with electronics (and I still don't know as much as I should...), so yeah I think you could piece together something like this. :)
I feel this on a personal level, albeit on my much smaller, less complicated projects. Thanks for the amazing write-up, you are an inspiration to us all.
Nice job! Are you going to do more designs in the future? Maybe Verilog/VHDL based?
Thanks :) Yeah, I already have another ongoing project based on a cheap FPGA board with a Cyclone II (quite old but it does the job), the idea is to keep it cheaper and much less complex. The FPGA has a Z80 implementation, video, sound and handle the game controllers. An external Atmega328 is used to handle the SD Card and then just RAM, an ICs for composite video and an op-amp. I also have some ideas for a better co…
https://github.com/niedzielski/swankmania/blob/master/DSC057... https://github.com/niedzielski/swankmania/blob/master/DSC057... https://github.com/niedzielski/swankmania/blob/master/DSC057...
Unfortunately, the physical hardware and later the code were both stolen in separate incidents. I was able to recover some version of the latter I had shared with a peer. It's posted in the same repo but probably not worth reviewing as it's from my college days and a total mess.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks :) Yeah, I already have another ongoing project based on a cheap FPGA board with a Cyclone II (quite old but it does the job), the idea is to keep it cheaper and much less complex. The FPGA has a Z80 implementation, video, sound and handle the game controllers. An external Atmega328 is used to handle the SD Card and then just RAM, an ICs for composite video and an op-amp. I also have some ideas for a better co…
I also made a Cyclone II FPGA implementation :] It looked like this and supported very primitive line rendering: https://github.com/niedzielski/swankmania/blob/master/DSC057... https://github.com/niedzielski/swankmania/blob/master/DSC057... https://github.com/niedzielski/swankmania/blob/master/DSC057... Unfortunately, the physical hardware and later the code were both stolen in separate incidents. I was able to recov…
I'm sorry the hardware and code were stolen.
And of course it's always worth reviewing, I got inspiration out of projects just like that and besides my code is a mess too, don't worry about that.
Ideally I'd like to see as few dangling wires when making something like this, because I have fat finger syndrome. :) I prefer joint wires with headers in them (like ATA cables) but that's just me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was doing a little bit of Z80 work a while back, but I didn't particularly seem to appreciate its design (compared to say MIPS). Why do you think it's beautifully designed?
You can hand clock a Z80. There is a certain magic to that.
This is the coolest thing I've seen posted on HN in years, very cool work. I've been playing with Atari 2600 programming on and off for the past few years and it is so fun programming directly against the specific hardware. I can't help but occasionally wonder if I could piece together a similar system, but I have 0 experience with electronics. I can only imagine how satisfying it must be to actually pull it off.
I think we need more of that too. Everyone seems to be on a quest for perfection: perfect code, 3D printed casing, everything intellectualised to the nth degree. There's a lot to be said for the "rough and ready" approach of experimentation. However to do that you really need to be on a pursuit for personal gratification because the internet is a harsh bitch for pointing out ones mistakes.
