29-12-2021, 08:39 AM
That sounds interesting!
I have never done much with a Z80, the only time I remember being when I learnt a little programming at college. Hand assembly rather than via an assembler. The only real interesting point I learnt was just how strange these things can get. This was one of these commecial board / keypad / led display things and someone had added an interface of some kind. The resultant higher load on the regulator chip meant, when I ran a 'Knight Rider' test program with flashing LEDs, that the regulator heated up and the program / LED flashing slowed, eventially the LED's stopped altogether and the program crashed. The interesting thing was the game of blowing on the regulator heatsink at the latest possible moment to resume normal operation before program operation totally crashed.
My main learning was on the 6502, although I preferred hand assembly as I could remember op codes, registers etc, and worked fast. For some reason I found assemblers hard work and jumped that step to C, Forth high level and inline code etc.
These days it is mainly the Arduino with me as I find them functional units for little tasks, the last being a throttle / multiple button USB addon for my flight simulator controls. There is a lot of software around for these and programming for many things is just a case of an appropriate module modified for purpose (as in the case of my control box). I do have a 6802 based system I built years ago but it's really a bit of a curiosity now as, even linking it with a PC would be hard work.
Tracy
I have never done much with a Z80, the only time I remember being when I learnt a little programming at college. Hand assembly rather than via an assembler. The only real interesting point I learnt was just how strange these things can get. This was one of these commecial board / keypad / led display things and someone had added an interface of some kind. The resultant higher load on the regulator chip meant, when I ran a 'Knight Rider' test program with flashing LEDs, that the regulator heated up and the program / LED flashing slowed, eventially the LED's stopped altogether and the program crashed. The interesting thing was the game of blowing on the regulator heatsink at the latest possible moment to resume normal operation before program operation totally crashed.
My main learning was on the 6502, although I preferred hand assembly as I could remember op codes, registers etc, and worked fast. For some reason I found assemblers hard work and jumped that step to C, Forth high level and inline code etc.
These days it is mainly the Arduino with me as I find them functional units for little tasks, the last being a throttle / multiple button USB addon for my flight simulator controls. There is a lot of software around for these and programming for many things is just a case of an appropriate module modified for purpose (as in the case of my control box). I do have a 6802 based system I built years ago but it's really a bit of a curiosity now as, even linking it with a PC would be hard work.
Tracy
