I was talking to Derek of Extreme Kits at the RC2014 Assembly 2.0 about having to underclock the Pico 2 for the MZ-80K and MZ-80A emulations in the Pico MZ. Derek has the opposite problem on the Pico RomWBW, as it doesn't run quite as quickly as a real RC2014.
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 MZ-80A emulations. I've even managed to update the documentation! I've limited testing to the Pico for the moment, as my…
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 write a MZ-700 emulator for my Pico MZ platform. I've started off by creating a branch of the Pico MZ-80K/A…
With winter dragging on, I've had plenty of time to add the code needed for MZ-80A emulation into the Pico MZ-80K/A, as I'm now rather inelegantly referring to it. From a user perspective there really isn't a huge difference between the two machines. The most noticeable change on the real…
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…
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…
I've owned a Pimoroni Pico VGA demo base since the very early days of the Raspberry Pico. I bought it after seeing a couple of videos showing its capabilities, with a vague idea that it might be fun to try to implement an emulator for an 8 bit computer of…