Tuesday 22 April 2014

Z80 Retro, now Arduino free.

Over the long weekend I managed to get some work done on my Z80 retro computer. Having previously used an Arduino for much of the control elements and power, I've built a switch based clock circuit using NAND gates, a 5v power supply using a LM7805 and a reset circuit using an inverter. So I became Arduino free. I also started hooking up the recommended buffers to the Z80's data and address pins, which made the whole thing more stable. However it's clear that I need now to move some of these circuits to strip board as I often have to check the wires are all in correct and the machine, which I'm going to have name, behaves erratically at times. Pictured is the clock circuit, which is based on this circuit diagram - http://cpuville.com/images/Z80/schematic_2.GIF