The V4Z80P - A Z80 Based Laptop

[michael_dorfman]

I'm an old 6502 guy myself, but this is seriously cool. I love projects like this-- I hope it inspires others, especially the young'uns, to take a look at some of the chips of yesterday.

[Nate75Sanders]

An upgraded version of the Osborne 1? :)

http://oldcomputers.net/osborne.html

5" screen...Z80...

[erikano]

From Wikipedia's article on the (Nintendo) Game Boy Color[1]: "The processor, which is a Z80 workalike made by Sharp with a few extra (bit manipulation) instructions, has a clock speed of approx."

From Wikipedia's article on the (Texas Instruments) TI-84 Plus Series[2]: "CPU: Zilog Z80 15 MHz, with 6 MHz compatibility mode."

Does this mean that a simple program written in Z80 Assembly could be run on both V4Z80P and Game Boy Color and/or TI-84 Plus with minor to no modifications? Does anybody know of any examples of this?

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Boy_Color

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-84_Plus_series

[rbarooah]

No, because these machines have different I/O & graphics hardware and no common operating system or BIOS layer to abstract them.

[plinkplonk]

whoa! Very impressive. I'd buy one of these if it were for sale.

I sometimes wonder why someone doesn't reissue the old Sinclair, Commodore, BBC, and Amiga machines as a "retro special edition"(licensing issues?).

My first computer was an ZX Spectrum and I'd gladly pay for a brand new machine.

[rdtsc]

> My first computer was an ZX Spectrum and I'd gladly pay for a brand new machine.

So was mine! I had a Russian clone of it. I love Z80 assembly. I remember I also had a C and Pascal compiler for it. I had to spend 10-15 minutes loading it from tape. Then one wrong pointer dereference and had to start everything from scratch.

[_b8r0]

Over at http://www.zxbada.bbk.org/badaloc_fpga/index.htm there's a Xilinx Spartan FPGA project. It should be possible to shoehorn this into a laptop case too.

[wazoox]

If you want to play with something similar, there's the Ben Nanonote : http://sharism.cc/

More powerful, but really cheap and fun. And so small.

[eternauta3k]

Old HP computers (the 95LX, 100LX and 200LX) still sell for upwards of $100 on eBay. Still, there probably aren't enough enthusiasts to justify launching a new product.

[Jeema3000]

Well it has happened - just not with home computers like the ZX Spectrum or Commodore 64, per se.

I'm thinking specifically of the Atari Flashback 2, which was a single-chip reimplementation of the Atari 2600 (even has cartridge connector solder points on the board). Then there's also the innumerable NES, Super NES, and Sega Megadrive/Genesis clones that have been produced recently...

[lkozma]

same here, I started on a ZX clone and really regret selling it for the equivalent of $15 when it was still working but I got a 386.

[zavulon]

Needs to have BASIC commands painted on the keys :))

[DanielH]

I like what these guys did with one of his boards :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8hL3Eiqh_c

[WalterGR]

Originally I/O was fixed to the IDE port allowing master and slave drives called IDE0: and IDE1: but now drive names are more virtual and are assigned to devices (“DRV0:”, “DRV1:” etc)

Is that wise? Shouldn't they be prefixed/suffixed with forward slashes?

[jfb]

Utterly heroic singing piggery. My hat's off to the OP.

[rwmj]

The video is excellent :-)

[t3rcio]

a work of art...