Amazing, I had this book in the early 80's. I came across it today while researching some of the old techniques used to save data to storage devices. In particular, audio cassette. Frequency Shift Key FSK was used to encode/decode the binary data to/from audio. Many of the arcade cabinet games, games such as Frogger and Dig Dug, of the time used the Zilog Z80 processor. This book, by Steve Ciarcia, was a complete guide to building your own computer with a 64KB address space from electronic components. The chips (ICs) mind you, not plug and play cards like people use these days when building home PCs. Shortly after the world of personal home computing took off and you had machines like the TRS80 and the simple beautifully functional ZX series of computers like the ZX81 and the ZX Sinclair available to the average consumer.
The wiki page is good enough for a head start on some of the history of this processor.
And if you want to build a version yourself from a parts kit this page by Donn Stewart should help you get started. It's chock full of goodies.
No comments:
Post a Comment