My Homebrew Z80 Microcomputer

Re:My Homebrew Z80 Microcomputer by tasty_freeze on Sunday February 12, 2017 @10:14PM (#13632878)

In 1985, when I first got out of college and started having spare money, I was finally in the position to build a Z80 computer (having spent a couple years in HS using trs-80s). I got the Steve Ciarcia book, started designing my own machine ... then I realized that a 68K CPU was only about $20 more. So I scrapped my Z80 plans and build a 68000 board instead. No regrets.

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Re:My Homebrew Z80 Microcomputer by XtalJ on Monday February 13, 2017 @01:29AM (#13633500)

I think my next project will be a computer based on the 68000 and the ISA bus :-)

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Re:My Homebrew Z80 Microcomputer by jecel on Monday February 13, 2017 @10:13AM (#13635793)

Here is a 68000 machine with an ISA bus I built in 1987:

http://www.merlintec.com/lsi/merlin2.html

It originally had an Ethernet interface instead of a bus, but since I couldn't get a PC Ethernet board to connect it to I ripped that out and did a simple ISA (actually 8 bit PC bus instead of full ISA) interface. This allowed me to use PC floppy and HD boards as seen in the picture so I could have a "sneakernet" in place of the missing Ethernet.

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Re:My Homebrew Z80 Microcomputer by XtalJ on Monday February 13, 2017 @11:58AM (#13636735)

Wow, really cool. Do you have more documentation about the ISA bus implementation? :-)

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