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The Z80 Mem­ber­ship Card (2015)

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Re: The Z80 Mem­ber­ship Card (2015)

#31

Post by MomsAVoxell »

unwind wrote: post #7

I think this is very cool, even though I have no historical connection to the Z80 it's of course a well-regarded and firmly entrenched/popular retro CPU. But this really is a stretch: The Z80 Membership Card itself is a stand-alone single-board computer that can "power up" your projects, like the Parallax BASIC Stamps or Arduino microcomputers. Both of those are very commonly called microcontrollers , not microcomput…

It’s pretty clear that the design of the Z80 Membership Card is intentionally steered towards the micro-computer ethos. The distinction between a microcomputer and a microcontroller is a subtle one; in fact, it’s up to the use-case whether either term is applicable. Microcontrollers do, indeed, provide lots of I/O and rudimentary computation capabilities - whereas Microcomputers have computing power, of a sort, and some facility for I/O which may - or may not be - expansive.

So the stretch is not much more than a matter of semantics, imho. I’ve used Z80’s as microcontrollers, I’ve also used them as microcomputers.

Re: The Z80 Mem­ber­ship Card (2015)

#32

Post by musicale »

billforsternz wrote: post #28

I love the Z80, I started my career writing Z80 assembly for various embedded projects on a Z80 host system 45 years ago. But you don't need a physical Z80 to enjoy that classic instruction set. For example see this source file from one of my projects; https://github.com/billforsternz/zargon/blob/main/src/zargon... The good ole' Z80 assembly code is right there unaltered on the right, but it executes using C macros.…

This is beautiful. It's like C turned into a clearer and more usable language.

Re: The Z80 Mem­ber­ship Card (2015)

#33

Post by flyinghamster »

wkjagt wrote: post #12
alnwlsn wrote: post #11

I grew up in a world where the Arduino already existed, but it was not until I tried building homebrew Z80 computers like this that I really felt I understood how computers/processors work at the low level. Consider this a warning though: this hobby has caused me to involuntarily collect every model of Z80 powered TRS-80 computer. If you wish to become hooked anyway, this project might be another good place to start:…

I went through the exact same process, but with the 6502 (Ben Eater's videos, and then another SBC of my own design after). It's helped me become a better programmer too. Example: pointers in C now feel very natural instead of some abstract idea of "memory addresses, whatever those are". And yep, I now also own many 6502 based computers :-)

Old greybeard here - I went the other way, learning 6502 assembler on an Apple II before I learned C. Having that 6502 experience when I first took a C class helped me immensely.

Re: The Z80 Mem­ber­ship Card (2015)

#34

Post by EvanAnderson »

flyinghamster wrote: post #33
wkjagt wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went through the exact same process, but with the 6502 (Ben Eater's videos, and then another SBC of my own design after). It's helped me become a better programmer too. Example: pointers in C now feel very natural instead of some abstract idea of "memory addresses, whatever those are". And yep, I now also own many 6502 based computers :-)

Old greybeard here - I went the other way, learning 6502 assembler on an Apple II before I learned C. Having that 6502 experience when I first took a C class helped me immensely.

I think any kind of assembly experience is tremendously helpful in learning C. Assembly makes pointers and pointer arithmetic very intuitive, in my opinion.

Re: The Z80 Mem­ber­ship Card (2015)

#35

Post by EvanAnderson »

musicale wrote: post #32
billforsternz wrote: post #28

I love the Z80, I started my career writing Z80 assembly for various embedded projects on a Z80 host system 45 years ago. But you don't need a physical Z80 to enjoy that classic instruction set. For example see this source file from one of my projects; https://github.com/billforsternz/zargon/blob/main/src/zargon... The good ole' Z80 assembly code is right there unaltered on the right, but it executes using C macros.…

This is beautiful. It's like C turned into a clearer and more usable language.

Seconding this opinion. That's some beautiful code and wonderful comments.

Re: The Z80 Mem­ber­ship Card (2015)

#36

Post by belviewreview »

My first computer was a Z80. It was an Amstrad 8256, also known as the Joyce. It was sold as a word processor, but it came with a copy of cp/m you could load in. I bought it because it was about as powerful as the Apple computer of the time, but at half the price. That was a great little computer.
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