Sinclair (10)
Retro Challenge - New IDEa
just a quick update about my Z80 development environment.
If you look down a couple of blogs, you'll see that I found an online Z80 emulator and I'd written a couple of bits that executed in it, so I was going to do my Z80 learning and development on that. However, there were two issues. The first being that it didn't run on Chrome on my Linux PC at home (but did on Chrome on Windows at work). The second issue is that it isn't a Z80 emulator, it's a 8080 emulator. I didn't think this would be a problem as they pretty much run the same instruction set, although the 8080 has a sub-set of the Z80 (well, technically, as the 8080 came first, the Z80 has an expanded instruction set), and I quite quickly came across an instruction that wasn't supported. Bugger! That's messed up that plan.
Then I remembered I have Fuse which is a ZX Spectrum emulator running on my Linux PC. There are oodles of menus and options which I've never looked at, but thought it worth a poke (no pun intended) about with.
Retro Challenge - Font Selection
So, if I'm going to write my name on a bunch of 8x8 LED matrix displays, I have a couple of options; Write my name on grid paper, colour in the squares, convert it to binary and transpose it to hexadecimal. Or... I could use a font that's already out there. Like the one that Sinclair used in the ZX Spectrum.
I've already got a copy of the Spectrum ROM, and, handily enough, all the characters are right at the very last part of the ROM address space (from 0x3D00 to 03FF), in consecutive blocks of 8 bytes.
I can see this coming in handy later!
