All of the buildings, all of those cars
were once just a dream
in somebody's head
Mercy Street - Peter Gabriel
Having had some hands-on experience now with the SSD1963 display I was somewhat disappointed in the performance. That should not have surprised me since there are a lot of pixels to be moved around with 24 bits colour depth. That’s roughly 1 MByte of memory that needs to be addressed with a humble 8 bits CPU. Even when it would run at 50 MHz, optimized assembly code is required and tricks to get the optimal results. And even then it probably would disappoint. There is a reason why our old…
Now that my terminal works, it’s time to put it into a nice enclosure. And what better enclosure than a replica of the DEC VT100 terminal? After all, this is the terminal that introduced the famous ANSI terminal codes which are still in use today.
A minimal set of routines to initialize the SSD1963 LCD Display Controller in combination with a 7" LCD Display as used by the Z20X computer.
Since quite some time now, I’ve been intrigued by the Zilog eZ80 which is a successor of the well known Z80. While the eZ80 remains binary compatible with the Z80 it does have some interesting extensions like a flat 24 bits address space (no ugly 64k segments!) allowing to address up to 16 MByte. More info can be found on this Wikipedia page.
This project is by no means finished (it never is ;-) but so far it works pretty well for me in combination with my RC2014 set up (a SC203 Modular Z180 Computer Kit for RC2014 extended with a Compact Flash Module for CP/M RC2014 Computer). But there is no doubt there are still bugs lingering around.
Cocoacrumbs