Pointless but fun ⁽³⁾

Retro Challenge - Day Off

So, having had a few fairly intensive days working on PCB design for my RC2014 computer, today was pretty much a day off.  Apart from daily household chores, all I got done today was this;

Now, to the untrained eye, that may look like a schematic layout for 4 8x8 LED matrix displayed connected to a Z80 bus via some 74LS374s.

But it's not.

Pre-RetroChallenge - The story so far

Ok, so tomorrow the Summer RetroChallenge 2014 starts, so I thought it would be a good idea to bring you up to speed with what I've got so far so that you know where I'm starting from. I will also outline where I'll be taking things for the RetroChallenge as well as where this project may go in the future.

So, in December 2013 I started poking around the internets for some ZX80 info, and I stumbled upon Grant Searles website. More specifically, he had the schematics for a Z80 based computer and a ROM with Microsoft BASIC on it. So, over Christmas I got out my breadboards and built it up pretty much as per the schematic.

Retro Challenge 2014

I have always wanted to enter Retro Challenge, ever since I first heard of it nearly 24 hours ago. I followed a link that took me to http://retrochallenge.net/ and I read up on what it was all about, scrutinised the rules and checked out what others were doing. I quickly came to the conclusion that I could give this a thing a go.

All I needed to do* was come up with a suitable challenge for myself.

I have decided to make my name appear in LED lights.

So an email was sent to the competition organisers;