Author: Tim

A RC2014 backplane 8 holding a RP2040 VGA terminal card. There's a passive buzzer attached to gpio 23 via the expansion header. The card is running the Pico MZ-80K emulator.

Pico MZ Release 3.1

Posted on 2 September 20262 September 2026 by Tim

This is the first release of Pico MZ in 2026. It fixes a number of problems that I’ve found since the 3.0 release last November and introduces the ability to

A Sharp MZ-700 with a Pico MZ (a repurposed RC2014 RP2040 VGA Terminal card).

Pico MZ at the RC2014 Assembly 2.0

Posted on 7 August 2026 by Tim

When the RC2014 assembly 2.0 was announced for Saturday 26th September 2026 at The National Museum of Computing, I decided to sign up as an exhibitor to give the first

Advent of Code 2020 in Fortran 77 (mostly)

Posted on 16 February 202617 February 2026 by Tim

It’s rained nearly every day since the start of 2026 in Devon. On January 27th the River Otter reached it’s highest recorded level. The picture below was taken from the

Building a Pico RomWBW

Posted on 7 January 2026 by Tim

At the end of September I attended the first RC2014 assembly at The National Museum of Computing. I’d gone with strict instructions not to buy any more computers, but I

The front cover of the book 'Algorithms' by Robert Sedgewick, published in 1983.

Advent of Code 2025 in Fortran 77 (mostly)

Posted on 24 December 2025 by Tim

This year’s Advent of Code was reduced to 12 days of puzzles. Thankfully, as I managed to complete the last puzzle I had outstanding (Day 10, part 2) a couple

Benchmarking the Pico MZ-700 vs the real hardware.

Pico MZ-700 – First release

Posted on 30 November 202530 November 2025 by Tim

When I first started thinking about writing an emulator for the Sharp MZ-80K in September 2024, I decided that I was only going to attempt that model and no more.

Pico MZ-700 progress

Posted on 20 November 202520 November 2025 by Tim

I’m making decent progress with adding MZ-700 emulation to the Pico MZ. As far as I can tell I have functionally correct code and I haven’t broken the MZ-80K and

Sharp MZ-700 boot screen on the Pico MZ emulator

A Pico MZ-700 ?

Posted on 21 October 202521 October 2025 by Tim

Autumn is here, so it means that the Caterham is SORNed until the spring, giving me time to tinker with some retrocomputing projects. The first project I’m attempting is to

A fragment of FORTRAN SOURCE code that is then compiled with Knight's WEE FORTRAN on the Pico MZ-80K

Fang, Claw and Knight’s WEE FORTRAN

Posted on 18 July 202526 July 2025 by Tim

I was recently sent a copy of Knight’s WEE FORTRAN by Sharpworks who had rescued it from a tape belonging to HereBeDragons. There are a couple of references to it

Monster Chase, Part 2

Posted on 7 July 202512 August 2025 by Tim

I’ve been working through a number of ideas to produce a Monster Chase / Robots hybrid for Sharp MZ series computers. I’ve been using my Pico MZ-80K/A emulator in K

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