When I set out to create the Pico MZ-80K, I swore that I'd only attempt to emulate the Sharp MZ-80K and not the whole MZ range. But it is very tempting to extend the code I have to cover the MZ-80A as well. There's not a lot of difference between…
A new year and I'm back to tinkering with the Pico MZ-80K emulator. I've started work on support for the RC2014's RP2040 VGA terminal card. I'd not had very much luck with it last year, but I'm now making decent progress thanks to a closer examination of the picoterm firmware…
Happy new year! This year's resolution is to blog a little more frequently, so I thought I'd start with a retrospective of last December's Advent of Code. I chose Fortran as my language (mostly 77, with a couple of forrays into 90 when I needed recursion). During Advent I managed…
I've temporarily given up on the floppy disk emulation for the Pico MZ-80K. I've managed to get the read emulation working reliably, but not writing. I appear to be missing a status register flag that tells the controller to stop writing and where to restart ... but I haven't been…
The quest continues! The disk images I found a couple of days ago turned out not to be MZ-80K compatible ones (at least, not with the original drives and SP-6015 BASIC configuration) so I ended up back at square 1. Reading the SP-6015 Disk BASIC manual (the link goes to…
Now that I have a release 1 of the Pico MZ-80K, I'm starting to work my way through a number of enhancements that have sprung to mind as I've tested it. The first thing I've tried - attempting to make it work on an RC2014 RP2040 VGA board - has…
I started this year's project with a challenge from an old Sharp Users Club magazine. "Who on earth would want to emulate an MZ-80K ... ?" We do hobbies for enjoyment and to learn something - about the subject matter, ourselves or both. So I want to answer the "why"…
As part of RetroChallenge 2024/10, I'm testing some old (and not so old) software on my Raspberry Pico MZ-80K emulator. BASIC programs (and link)NotesBASIC SP-5025Supplied with the Sharp MZ-80K as standard. Works as expected. The programs in this table were all written for this dialect of BASIC.BackgammonDistributed by Knight's Computers…