Hey All, Alan, you may recognise this idea, it started off as a serial terminal for an rc2014 I mentioned over on that list a few months ago. I have a Z180 running with a PC floppy drive. Serial should be "relatively" simple to add.
An epaper display was in consideration, but they are very delicate, I had one on a pi zero break a few weeks ago and I have no idea how. I'm using a 2.8" e-ink display on a pico w to grab and display a random fortune every 30 minutes right now. There is a Z80 emulator for the Pico out there, so some 8085 code should run, like on the Z80 upgrade to the m100. Matrix Orbital have a 240x64 LCD display, and most of the displays of a similar size understand the Matrix Orbital protocol. It's mostly writing the code to get the emulator to use this stuff. I see the Pico2 has been announced, lower power, plus I am hearing it can map PSRAM to the internal bus. I had not considered an FPGA, but I like playing with the Picos. Regards, Marcus B On Fri, 9 Aug 2024, at 11:49, B 9 wrote: > > > On Thu, Aug 8, 2024 at 11:16 AM John R. Hogerhuis <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> A pico could certainly do everything a M100 workalike needs in a CPU, >> probably even implement an 8085 instruction set. >> >> It's amazing how democratizing all this is... individual engineers can make >> their own cases, compatible CPUs, good keyboards. Off the shelf displays of >> needed proportion... > > I love your vision, John. > > This might be a case where an FPGA would be useful — write your own hardware > in software! There's a generic retro emulation system called MiSTer FPGA > <https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Wiki_MiSTer/wiki> (which would be overkill > for this), but I'm surprised that I cannot find any mention of it being able > to emulate a Model T! Maybe somebody needs to release an open core for the > 8085A; I see there are some toy ones out there in Verilog and VHDL, but it > looks like the real ones are still proprietary. > > > For a sunlight visible display that is also low power, I hope someone makes a > DIY laptop with an ePaper display. (Yes, it would be slow as molasses, but > prices have come down a lot and it can be usable if you restrict the screen > refreshes to a region.) > > —b9 >
