I'm an old 6502 guy myself, but this is seriously cool. I love projects like this-- I hope it inspires others, especially the young'uns, to take a look at some of the chips of yesterday.
From Wikipedia's article on the (Nintendo) Game Boy Color[1]: "The processor, which is a Z80 workalike made by Sharp with a few extra (bit manipulation) instructions, has a clock speed of approx."
From Wikipedia's article on the (Texas Instruments) TI-84 Plus Series[2]: "CPU: Zilog Z80 15 MHz, with 6 MHz compatibility mode."
Does this mean that a simple program written in Z80 Assembly could be run on both V4Z80P and Game Boy Color and/or TI-84 Plus with minor to no modifications? Does anybody know of any examples of this?
The specs are not just different, they're pretty much unresolvable.
The TI-8x series - even the 68k-based TI-89 - uses a 1-bit raster display(grayscale is achieved with CPU-heavy high-frequency toggling) with different resolutions and wider aspect ratios than the Game Boy, and it has no built-in audio. The Game Boy has character-mapped sprite, background, and foreground layers and audio functions with pulse, DPCM, and noise channels(it should also be noted that like the NES before it, sound functions are integrated onto a custom CPU; it has a substantially different instruction set that is a cross of 8080 and Z80 capabilities). They both have plenty of buttons, so there is at least a common functionality subset there.
The main advantage of the TI is that there's a large amount of memory/storage for an 8-bit processor(128kb, 48kb user data within the OS, 1.5MB flash). The Game Boy, like most cartridge consoles, is memory-starved and relies on ROM for everything. So there's little hope for porting TI games to Game Boy, as well.
> My first computer was an ZX Spectrum and I'd gladly pay for a brand new machine.
So was mine! I had a Russian clone of it. I love Z80 assembly. I remember I also had a C and Pascal compiler for it. I had to spend 10-15 minutes loading it from tape. Then one wrong pointer dereference and had to start everything from scratch.
Old HP computers (the 95LX, 100LX and 200LX) still sell for upwards of $100 on eBay. Still, there probably aren't enough enthusiasts to justify launching a new product.
Well it has happened - just not with home computers like the ZX Spectrum or Commodore 64, per se.
I'm thinking specifically of the Atari Flashback 2, which was a single-chip reimplementation of the Atari 2600 (even has cartridge connector solder points on the board). Then there's also the innumerable NES, Super NES, and Sega Megadrive/Genesis clones that have been produced recently...
Originally I/O was fixed to the IDE port allowing master and slave drives called IDE0: and IDE1: but now drive names are more virtual and are assigned to devices (“DRV0:”, “DRV1:” etc)
Is that wise? Shouldn't they be prefixed/suffixed with forward slashes?
