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v8080 #108
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CP/M will happily run with a video terminal as well. It has no idea whether the BIOS call it made went out of a serial port, wrote to a textmode display, drew bitmaps or trapped out of emulation into something. It does need some simple terminal emulation logic but that's not hard and lots of old CP/M systems had that. Just don't pick horrors like VT100. ADM3A emulation was popular as being an early terminal it was simple and only had clear screen, home, up, down, left, right, set cursor position. |
As an aside parity checking is indeed fairly rare and the only time you need to evaluate parity is on PUSH PSW and conditional jump using that flag. You need to store the byte whose parity is supposedly in the flag somewhere but you don't actually need to calculate the parity unless someone asks or it becomes observable by other means (PUSH PSW)... For an early hack you may well still have to deal with Z80 aware code using SUB A to check Z80 v 8080. |
Thanks! The worry about including the video terminal is more about the ~30K effective RAM pressure it creates than about anything else. 1 pixel = 1 byte, no tiling, while each line of 160 pixels leaves a gap of 96 bytes in that memory page. We can perhaps reduce it to ~20K by further reducing the number of text rows, and by sharing the black lines between them. [I'm planning something like that to make MS BASIC and Apple 1 BASIC work on the stock 32K system BTW.]. For SDC/MMC enabled systems we can safely assume 64K/128K is available, but still... |
The other issue is if a 40x20 character video terminal is in any sense "workable" for applications other than Zork. We just have 160 pixels after all. (Or 256 if we allow scrolling, giving 64 chars) |
My Epson PX-4 has a 40x8 display. In software it has an 80x25/40x43 display of which you see a window that tracks the cursor and can be scrolled around. It's quite usable for most things. Trek would suck I suspect though 8) |
In a similar manner as vCPU and v6502, add an interpreter for the 8080 instruction set as suggested by AlanC.
Justification: together with a block device (SDC/MMC), this opens the road to run CP/M on the Gigatron. 8080 is much simpler than Z80, and sufficient to get CP/M and applications running. We probably need to interface with CP/M over a SPI interface, instead of having the Gigatron act as a video terminal like we're used to now. (But we can still use the VGA output as a "god view" of the memory in the CP/M system. Thanks to OscarV for this idea.)
Points of attention:
Some links, courtesy KenB for sending these:
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