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Zilog To File For Chapter 11
Frédéric writes: "The venerable company ZiLOG who was founded in 1974, and who brought us the famous Z80 CPU (used in the Timex/Sinclair ZX80/ZX81, and the Amstrad CPC/PCW computers), is filling for Chapter 11 ... I didn't find the today's news on the web, but found this article at Silicon Strategy and this one at Electronics times, which was written a few days ago to announce it."
Z80 also powered the sound chip in the Sega Genesis and a modified chip was used in the Gameboy.
It was also used to run many classic arcade machines such as Pac-Man.
Don't forget that the Z80A was the CPU for TRS-80 model 1's & 3's, too. It was the first assembly I learned and it taught me a vast respect for memory conservation (4K was all that was available at the time).
was MBSSR (make baloney sandwich and shift right one bit)
Can you do anything with an 8-bit microcontroller anymore? :)
Although putting an embedded web server on a Z80-based machine is kinda cool.
Also the Early Radio Shack Machines. TRS-80 Model 1 through 4. I once had a Model 6000 running XENIX that had both a Motorola 68000 and then a Z80 for I/O functions
Don't forget that the TRS-80 Models 1 to 4 also used the Z80 and derivitives. The Model I was one of the first computers I could get some hands-on experience with. I used to play with them at the Radio Shack stores in 5th & 6th grade, and later in Junior High, I got special permission to experiment with them. Those were the days...
As a owner of a fully decked out TRS-80 Model I, II and Timex Sinclar 1000, I'm sorry to see them go under. I bet a lot industrial and robot controller companys aren't to thrilled ethier as the CPU has been a sort of staple for them for quite sometime.
I guess the PIC / microcontroller chip market really took over, leaving little room for Zilog...
What about second sources?
ZiLOG intends to launch an exchange offer in which all holders of its notes will be offered the opportunity to exchange their notes for shares of ZiLOG common stock, plus a pro rata share of the $30 million non-recourse note. The exchange offer, which for tax and other legal reasons the company intends to complete through a prepackaged Chapter 11 filing, is not expected to have any adverse affect on its day-to-day operations or on its ability to provide a full range of products and services to its customers or pay its suppliers on normal terms.
I dont think we have much to worry about here.
Tux Games. Your complete source for native Linux games.
Most of you couldn't understand what we are feeling - as you are not part of the tightly knit Zilog user community. Our usenet group: comp.zilog has had the same core membership for over ten years and we are all very close. Every third Thursday we would gather at our favorite Silicon Valley pub for fond memories and circuit diagrams. We have watched our children grow up. We have celebrated holidays together. Those of you outside the Zilog enthusiast community could not understand what we are feeling.
The Z80 is also used in the venerable TI-85 calculator, and related models.
...they die. I had recently gone to have my wisdom teeth extracted, and there, in the same complex as the oral surgeon, was the Zilog offices in Austin. I remember thinking at that time : "Are they still around?". Then I blinked, and next thing I know I am reading of their demise on /. .
Sigh. The older you get, the faster time flies.
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
..was the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. I don't know what was the name in US, maybe Timex Spectrum. Fact is, it sold more pieces than Amstrad and TRS together, by almost an order of magnitude.
When you add Spectrum, Spectrum 48 and Spectrum +, that is. However, the Spectrum was much cheaper than the Amstrad (also sold under the Schneider brand), and might have made less money to the vendor (Sinclair/Timex).
Gosh, I can't believe there will be no Z-80! That's the only assembler I know....
Sigged!
I'd be sad to see a company that's such a piece of microprocessor history disappear.
:-(
My first computer was a 1978 NASCOM-1 kit (a board, bag of chips and seperate bare transformer!) that was based on a 1 MHz Z80 with a whopping 2K of memory - 1K for the monitor program, and 1K for the user. Back in those days we programmed from memory directly in hex - none of this fancy modern symbolic assembler stuff!
Zilog also had 16 and 32 bit microprocessors, but neither took off - the Z80 has had a long life though.
The story of the Z80 is quite interesting - the design of the Intel 8080 basically walked down the road in the head of the designers who then designed the Z80 which was close to being dual 8080's on a single die - with it's dual A and A' register sets.
Ah, the good old days....
You'd be surprised on how many companies are running under Chapter 11 protection. There are a lot more than you'd think.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
Remember, this is not an involuntary bankruptcy (at least not completely). Zilog is filing a "pre-pack" which means that they've gotten together in advance with all of their creditors and gotten them to exchange their debt for equity. Zilog will not disappear - in fact, this really only stands to make them financially healthier.
The best DOS Speccy emu right now is realspec (Ramsoft), which will run under dosemu (minus sound or joystick support), but there are many emulators for various systems, so take a look at worldofspectrum and take your pick :)
Interestingly, the just shipped a new eZ80 webserver three days ago.
I think I'll stop here.
Intertec's Superbrain, built around 1979, had dual Z80s (one for diskette I/O and booting, the other for everything else). 16k of DRAM - expandable to 64k with a soldering iron. It ran CP/M 2.2. I last used it in 1989 for a college project.
Go ahead, tell me I am trolling, but how on earth did a company with an ancient, 8-bit architecture manage to get idiots to throw $280M at it? My cat will design you an old 8-bit architecture for 1/10,000 of that and I promise she won't file for chapter 11.
Did they REALLY expect a Z80 with a TCP/IP stack to set the world on fire enough to pay back $280M? QUARTER OF A BILLION DOLLARS!?!?!
when i first reloaded the page, i saw the Z in Zilog and thought, 'Jesus! Zapmedia went out of business already? Now that's some /. effect.'
your jesus is another mans xebu. chew on that hypocrites.
There is actually a Z80 in the new Gameboy Advance. This is for providing the Gameboy Color compability mode.
Once people started writing emulators for all of the old classic computer systems, there was no reason for anyone to go out and buy the real thing. The hackers stole the liveleyhoods of the Z80 designers. I hope they can sleep at night.
Apple ][e with a z80 coprocessor card, 80 column card with +64k, a super serial card, two count em two fdds, boy howdy that was a monster. my mom ran wordstar, i hacked on cp/m and squandered my youth to bbs and sierra games.
years later when i finally got a chance to use dos, i thought hey, this is just like cp/m! little did i know.
In the UK, Sinclair computers and their derivtives were huge - much more well known than the US Timex TRS-XX machines (though geeks here seem to remember them fondly:
IIRC, all these machines had some Z-80 derivative:
ZX80 1K RAM (actually named after the year it came out)
ZX81 1K or 16K RAM
Spectrum (development codename ZX82) 16K or 48K RAM [+]
Spectrum + (larger, "better" keyboard)
Spectrum 128 (a vast 128K of RAM)
Spectrum 128 +2 (built in cassette deck!)
Spectrum 128 +3 (build in 3" *not 3.25"* 2 sided (by ejecting it and turning it over) floppy disk)
There were a couple of others.
Then also things like the
MGT Sam Coupe - which was compatible
I, my family or my firends owned every single one of these fine Z80 powered machines at one time or another. Hell, I learned to program in Sinclair basic. If Zilog have gone under (Chapter 11 doesn't mean its necessarily over) this is a sad day.
[+] actually this was a marketing lie. It had 32K RAM and 16K ROM with a unified address space. I think the 16K version had the same ROM, so it would be fairer to call that a 32K, if you want to include the total...
Lord Pixel - The cat who walks through walls
A little bigger on the inside than out
Yes, even Commodore used a Z80. Specifically in the C-128, which could boot into a CP/M mode running on the Z80, or into regular C-128 mode on the 8502, or into C-64 emulation mode (also on the 8502). I don't think there was any way to run both CPUs at the same time.
I don't know how many people actually used this feature (probably not many, given how well the C-128 did in the marketplace), but it was kind of neat at the time.
Better stock up on this collector's item:
Z80 assembly language subroutines
by Lance A. Leventhal
Availability: Seller usually ships in 1-2 business days
ASIN: 0931988918
Sigh. Tears well up in my eyes. My first paying job out of school was writing Z80 assembly code for the Sega GameGear and Nintendo GameBoy (a crippled, cheapo Z80 on the Nintendo).
And I suspect there were a bunch of arcade games that ran a Z80 besides PacMan.
Rest in peace, my little 8 bit friend, RIP.
"Once we successfully address the issue of our senior notes, ZiLOG will be well positioned to compete during this difficult period and to take full advantage of the eventual economic recovery," Thorburn said.
They filed chapter 11 for strategic reasons, not because they'd gone totally bust.
Last time I saw one was at Fry's Electronics...it was selling for $2.50, I think. In bulk, I'll bet they cost less than $0.50. I've also heard they're a favorite for embedded apps like traffic light controllers.
I still have a copy of Leventhal's Z80 Assembly Language Programming on my shelf in the "retired" section, right next to the Turbo C Bible. :-)
Pop quiz, hot shot. Tell me what this Z80 code does...
LD BC,0FFFFH
LOOP: DEC BC
JP NZ,LOOP
Am I the only one who read the headline as "Zig to file for Chapter 11"?
My first thought was "It can't be! What am I supposed to take off when CATS - the jerk - steals the deed to all my base yet again?"
My second thought was "Take off every bancruptcy lawyer! For great settlements!"
My third thought was "I'd better post this, before I realize how stupid a post it is and think twice."
My final thought was "Boy, that was a stupid post", but by then, I'd already posted it.
Sorry.
-Denor
wasn't the Z80 the first chip that got popular for overclocking? I recall reading somewhere that it became the posterchild for overclocking because you could set the clock from 8 to 10 Mhz for a lot cheaper than whatever intel had out.
Free domain names, $$$-free and restriction-free. Cool aTLDs, that make sense. Built in DynDNS. http://www.freenic.ntwrk
Just so you know, no one can actualy get to the URL you have posted unless they've already hooked up to your DNS servers.
Or is it a joke?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
...the Sharp Wizard OZ-770PC. It's amazing! 3MB of flash ram, qwerty keyboard, proportional fonts, you can code in raw Z80 assembler for it, plus they have versions of C and BASIC for it. Tons of user written programs on the net. (MyWizard.com and many other sites) Best $100 I ever spent. I much prefer this design to a Palm-style tablet. Here is a good picture.
;)
And no, I am not affiliated with Sharp or Amazon
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
HA! dude, they are hackers, they don't sleep at night.
but i feel you bro, i sure hope you don't loose sleep fretting about bygones. or plummeting portfolio value?
methinks you prefer sleeping.
...for a good long time, methinks. I found this passage in the article at Electronics Times most interesting.
"The company's problems became apparent when its sales dropped for calendar 2000 to $239.2m from the previous year's $245.1m... The fall was blamed on a disasterous diversification away from Zilog's core microprocessor and microcontroller lines."
This really rings true for me. Zilog knew how to do microcontrollers very well indeed, and they were making good money at it. They still can, and I hope they still will even with the re-org.
Oh, and to the troll who posted earlier about "They're still pushing the Z80," and to those who wonder if anyone "still uses 8-bit microprocessors," it is painfully obvious that you're not hardware engineering folk. Otherwise, I doubt you would have even imagined making such narrow-minded comments.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
I rememebr programming a Z80 Microtrainer in college; it had a keypad for hex code, but I managed to smuggle in a friend's copy of the ZAD cross-compiler to the lab. We had these old 286's with serial-to-headphone jacks that connected to the microtrainer. You typed in your assembly code on the 286, ran it through ZAD, and uploaded it to the microtrainer. You could even hear the data being transfered via the speaker on the microtrainer.
t or/
I remember having my first real experience with handling Interrupt Requests in a lab with the Z80. Too bad the company is having trouble.
I tried to find a pic of the old microtrainer (made by CAMI Research), but alas, they no longer support it.
I did manage to find a link to another University that used them for ECE projects. (Thanks Google!)
http://comet.ctr.columbia.edu/msl/2000class/eleva
Go ahead, tell me I am trolling, but how on earth did a company with an ancient, 8-bit architecture manage to get idiots to throw $280M at it?
By creating an architecture that is still used today in everything from calculators to embedded industrial control applications. Not every application needs ghz class CPUs, 512MB of RAM, and pipelined parallel processing.
It's guys like you that keep guys like me employed. Every problem presented to you is solved with a PC in some form factor or another. Computerized home thermostat? Mini PC on a board. Web server for monitoring temperature and pressure? PC in a rack mount case with an A/D board. Telephone voice mail system? PC in a funny looking case. Then when your product is hopelessly over the price target and behind schedule, guys like me get calls, choose an appropriate architecture, be it a PIC, Z80, AVR, or something else, and get the project back in line with reality.
Go ahead and mod this down as flamebait or troll if you want. I've got 50 Karma points as I post this so I'll live with 47 if need be.
The most popular z80 machine, I'm sure, was the game boy.
Anyway, z-80 isn't going to die, the company is just going for bankruptcy, not dissolving. And if it did dissolve I'm sure that people would continue to make chips.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Zilog not only made processors but also a rich array of peripheral chips including SCSI chips used in earlier Sun and Macintosh workstations. Unfortunately, Zilog got too big for its britches and forgot who brung them to the dance: small independent software developers. In recent years, unless they thought you were going to place an order for one million chips, their attitude became "go away, son, you bother me."
Can't say that I'll cry any tears for Zilog.
Chapter 11 - Chapter 11 of the Bankruptcy Code is frequently referred to as "reorganization." Although an individual may file under Chapter 11, generally it is used to reorganize a business. Individuals with large federal or state tax obligations may use Chapter 11 because an extended period of time may be obtained for the repayment of the taxes. Chapter 11 generally allows the debtor to continue its business operations as it proceeds to the desired goal of a confirmed Plan of Reorganization, which must meet certain statutory criteria. A major rationale for business reorganizations is that the value of a business as an ongoing concern is greater than it would be if its assets were liquidated and sold. Generally, it is more economically efficient in the long run to reorganize than to liquidate, because doing so preserves jobs and assets. Cooperation among the various interests, however, is crucial to a successful reorganization.
Chapter 7 is liquidation where basically everything is gone. Chapter 11 doesn't necessarily mean death for a company. Hell, look at Chrysler.
Well, I am not as old as some of you guys, but I remember the very day I got my TI-85. The first thing I learned (in about a week) was TI's Basic language. I quickly became bored with that because it did not offer the programmer a whole lot of options. I then discovered that the TI-85 could be programed in ASM... at that point I did not know ASM at all (well besides an inline ASM line I used in Turbo Pascal to turn off the damned blinking cursor) so I bough a book on Z80 ASM.
:) )
After a couple of months I came out with my first ASM game, yea it wasn't all that great but it paved the road for the following games. In those next three years I released 8-9 pretty darn good games for the 85, after that I got a shiney new TI-86 and never touched the 85 again (but again it had a Z80, and a TON more ram to work with). I programed a few games for the 86, but I had slowed down a lot from when I had first started.... I guess I began to get a little bored.
I had a lot of fun with the Z80 cpu, its ASM language was pretty easy to get the hang of, and it wasn't a slouch.... my games ran fast. I no longer am a part of the TI community, I have moved onto bigger and better things (let me tell ya, knowing ASM in college was awesome.... my asm classes and computer architecture were much easier
I know there optimizing compilers exist... and they are darn good at what they do, but still there is nothing like optimizing key functions in your code by hand.... Thanks Zilog, you have given me a life skill.
I'm from Nampa, ID, just down the road from the Nampa Zilog-manufacturing plant. I can't say that i didn't see huge losses coming from this company, although the bankruptcy surprised me.
Zilog has had problems finding a niche for quite some time. In recent years (months?), they have been highly influenced by the market trends, which have affected their product directions. I mean, their main product as of recent is a z80 webserver kit.
I still think there's plenty of room in the market for a microcontrollers company, but this company needs some serious restructuring. Along those same lines, they need to keep their logos for more than a month at a time. Every time I drive by the plant they have a new logo and coloring scheme, the most recent of which is a horrid yellow-on-purple. You haven't seen tacky until you've seen a beautiful, white, futuristic-looking technology building with a giant yellow 'Z' plastered on the front, covering all the windows.
Should have seen this bankrupty coming from that alone!
anyone know where i could pickup a cheap dev kit for one of these that i could just throw in my comp and mess around with?
Man, lots of fond reminiscing here about the Z80 (and clones). Quite rightly, too... the Z80 was a fun little beast.
... rr14). The Z8001 and Z8003 were "segmented", but they used a reasonable segmentation model to achieve 8M memory...
Zilog, however, made lots of other stuff. Some were moderately successful (Z8530 SCC), some not so (Z8000 MPU).
The Z8000 actually was fairly popular in military applications until COTS took over. I seem to recall many avionics systems used it. When it came out, it was comparable to the 68K.
It had 16 16bit registers (r0-r15), each of which could be addressed as 2 8-bit registers (rhN, rlN). R15 was the stack pointer. Nice orthagonal instruction set, with logical block moves (similar to the Z80 LDIR instruction), as compared to the intel REP instructions...
The registers could be doubled up into 32-bit registers (rr0, rr2,
The low 16 bits were the offset in the segment, and the high 7 bits were the segment number. So, you essentially had 23 bit addressing. Of course, the way you generated segmented addresses was a tad odd... I believe bits 30:24 were the segement number in a 32-bit address.
Only problem was, they never got the Z8070 FPU working. Bummer.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Bankruptcy is really just delaying the inevitable. Look at Enron. Or Polaroid. Bankrupt means your time has passed and lets find a way of orderly repaying creditors.
Holly: I was in love once - a Sinclair ZX-81. People said, "No, Holly, she's not for you." She was cheap, she was stupid and she wouldn't load - well, not for me, anyway.
Lister: What are you trying to say, Hol?
Holly: What I'm saying, Dave, is that it's better to have loved and to have lost than to listen to an album by Olivia Newton-John.
Cat: Why's that?
Holly: Anything's better than listening to an album by Olivia Newton-John.
Maybe this could be a model for new IPO's... ;)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
... was the dual register set. It was used to good advantage in embedded systems where the executive would use one set and the app would use the other. If you remember the chess program Sargon, it used one set for white's state and one for black's. It was a pretty neat machine. But like many of the 8-bit stuff out there, it didn't make the jump to 16 bits gracefully. The Z8000 was pretty dismal...
That is all.
I ported 3COM's UNET TCP/IP stack to an Onyx Z8000 box around 1982. This may have been the first single-chip microprocessor on the Internet. It was at IP address [128.5.32.5]. Note that that's class B network #5; this was early stuff.
In addition to the mentioned Sega Genesis sound controller, I recall seeing Zilog chips being used on many motherboards (not just computer motherboards either). The one I know off the top of my head is Sun SPARCs up to Sun 4m. They had Zilog serial controllers on them.
from their website:
ZiLOG REACHES AGREEMENT IN PRINCIPLE WITH KEY BONDHOLDERS TO SUPPORT ITS PLAN TO RECAPITALIZE COMPANY
A Significant Step in Returning the Company to Full Financial Health;
Follows Strong Third Quarter Performance
Campbell, CA (November 27, 2001) ZiLOG,® Inc., the Extreme Connectivity(TM) Company, today announced it has reached an agreement in principle with certain key holders of its Senior Secured Notes to support the company's plan to recapitalize ZiLOG. These bondholders hold more than 60 percent of the senior debt outstanding. Under the proposed recapitalization plan, ZiLOG's bondholders would exchange their $280 million in notes for equity, plus a $30 million non-recourse note.
"We have made significant progress in returning ZiLOG to full financial health," said Jim Thorburn, ZiLOG's Chief Executive Officer. "We have a cash flow positive business and on approval of this plan we will substantially strengthen our balance sheet, with the elimination of our senior notes."
Aren't the chipsets for Sun's serial ports made by Zilog? If so, I wonder how this will affect Sun.
"Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer." -Adolf Hitler
"We are one Nation, we are one People." -The One 'leader'
Yes there really is a 20MHz z80.
and don't forget that Z-80 was used in
MSX, MSX-2, MSX-2+ and lots of
xmame^H^H^H^H^Harcades games as the main processor,
dual processor (SMP?!?), co-processors for some
others 32bit processors (68000) and even as the
sound processor.
This can be checked when you start a game in xmame.
Hi,
h tm
I'm an electrical engineer - I design chips like
the ones Zilog made.
I used to work in the Treasure Valley, and had
contacts to Zilog. Their management and safety
practices were like something out of the 1950's.
Here's an article about 30 employees suing them
for chemical exposure:
http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/ctb913.
Chemical exposure happens in this industry, but
the really stupid thing about this case was that
(a) The employees were exposed to chemicals
that all the other chip fabs stopped using 10
years ago; (b) the management wouldn't do simple
things like fix the ventilation system.
Their attidude was, "If we fix the ventilation
system, we are admitting there was a problem
with it before we fixed it, and then the
employees could sue is."
I wouldn't work for a company like that -
apparently, other qualified engineers felt the
same way.
Maybe now the Z80 is just for embedded devices. But from about 1980-1984, I worked at a place that sold Z80-based word-processors (when a 'word-processor' was a physical box). We had all the usual features for that era, such as footnotes, spell-checking, mail-merge, and even a builtin spreadsheet.
And it was all written in hand-coded assembler.
I'm one of those veterans who built his own computer at the dawn of the Personal Computer era. The 4 MHz Z80 was the ne plus ultra of the processor world, and we thought we were hot stuff when we managed to overclock one above 5 MHz. Their Serial I/O chips were also the most advanced thing going for serial comms, and we implemented many protocols like X.25 and PARS that formerly required a complete circuit board for what the SIO did. It's a bit sad to see what was once the cutting edge company brought so low.
Actaully, it was a 6510, not 8502 (or 6502)
6510 was in the C=64. 8502 was in the 128. Atari had a 6507, and NES had a 2A03 (6502 without decimal mode and with a few tone generators on-die).
Will I retire or break 10K?
I agree with you about the 6502, but not about the Z-80. IMHO the best 8/16 bit CPU is the 6809, or perhaps the Hitachi 6309 (which extended the 6809 architecture nicely...too bad folks in the US didn't know about it for years). The 63C09 has been run at 5 MHz, and there's a company called INICORE that counts among its products iniCPU, a logic design burnable into FPGA or ASIC that implements the 6809 instruction set--the web page cites its performance running at 40 MHz.
...but there are other things she won't be able to do that will hinder the success of her chip in the embedded market. My cat could probably also design an 8-bit processor, but the documentation process - in fact, the entire support process - needed to bring a chip to market would be a little beyond her. Without opposable digits, she would be unable to type up the whitepapers and specs, and without the power of speech, she would not be able to dictate this information. So, unless my own cat blatantly copied an older processor, no one except her would be able to develop for it.
Of course, if my cat did manage to successfully document her chip, I'm sure she's sell it for a reaonable price - a lifetime supply of canned food, say. She and I both know that's a little steep for an 8-bit chip, but who can say no to my adorable little cat?
I'm the stranger...posting to
Look, nobody's gonna buy an 8-bit personal computer these days. The only use for Zilogs is in embedded apps, and that can't be emulated away.
I'm the stranger...posting to
Go read Von Neumann and Turing. You can do ANYTHING with an 8-bit microcontroller. It just isn't necessarily easy.
Alan Turing worked on theoretical machines with a bounded program but unbounded data memory. I don't see Photoshop running on a machine with an address space of 64 kilobytes unless there's some heavy bankswitching going on.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Actually, it's also used (in GBA mode) as the "sound cpu".
You're confusing the GBA with the Sega Nomad. I have written some software for the Game Boy Advance. The technique of letting a second cheap CPU handle some sound chores is common on Sega Genesis and necessary on Super NES (which has very little bandwidth between the sound side and the CPU side of the system), but in Advance mode, the GBA completely cuts power to its GBZ80 processor.
Read more about the GBA hardware here.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The Amstrad was my first computer; at around the age of 8 my Dad brought home a CPC 464 (64k, green mono monitor). Told me later he traded it for his old CD player, or somesuch, plus got a sackful of games with it too (cassette, naturally). Eventually got the CPC6128 (128k and a disk compatible with nothing else on earth, and colour!)
I started programming it in BASIC, but that wasn't going anywhere fast (being able to run three times around the house while a sprite is being drawn isn't all that impressive). So I picked up a book on Z80 machine code (mnemonics and encodings, interrupt modes, etc.) and started writing. Hex. No assembler. Mostly RSXes (Resident System Extensions - "|"-commands callable from BASIC, like "|SPRITE,1,x,y"). Teaches you to be very careful about counting your jump offsets. The screen memory was even worse than the VGA's bit planes, though; pixels were interleaved most horribly. (And only a British machine would have a firmware call named KL_TIME_PLEASE....)
I eventually got an assembler, which was heaven compared to hand-hacking the machine code. I was pretty far along on a clone of the early Sierra games (Space Quest etc.). I stopped working on that when we moved from the UK to Canada, and I bought a '386 (writing assembly in DEBUG... but we won't go there, except to say that compared to Z80 the 80x86 instruction set is huge; it even had a multiply instruction - what luxury! No slam on the Z80, though; "small is beautiful").
I also did a lot of reverse engineering of games, especially Sorcery Plus; that taught me a lot (the multimode trick, for those that know the game, is very slick; basically it changes screen modes in the middle of the video refresh).
There are several good CPC emulators, too.
Recently I started on a Windows version of a game I typed in from Amstrad Computer User magazine ("Roland Takes a Running Jump", Z80 assembler, serialized over something like 8 issues; I missed the map creator issue so had to write my own). Cheesy old game, but fun... being able to design levels for it was especially neat. My (non-programmer... I knew no programmers then) friends and I would often design sets of levels for each other to play.
What's my point? Do I have one? If I did it would be: learning to program by typing in machine code in hex was really great (because no other language could ever faze me), and I just wanted to say a few things from experience about a great old Z80 platform.
Any other Amstrad hackers out there?
Yes there really is a 20MHz z80.
Wow. Imagine the Sinclair Spectrum running at 20MHz... (slap) no, all the games were heavily relying on timings, so they wouldn't work at all.
Nice though for Zeus or BASICA...
... of my first time to the NCC, in the early '70s - when Zilog had first announced the Z8000.
One of the things I did was drop by the Zilog booth - twice (the second time when the head of the project was there), to comment on the instruction set. Went something like this:
Me: ~"This is a really great instruction set. But there's one thing missing. When an instruction is aborted by an external memory controller and the interrupt taken, the state isn't preserved well enough to restart the instruction after the memory fault is fixed. You could do true virtual memory if you fixed that.~"
Him: ~"We're not planning to do that. We already looked at it, and it would expand the microcode by about 50%~"
Me: ~"Oh, good. Then (given Moore's law improvements in silocon fabrication) it could be done in 6 to 9 months.~"
Him: ~"Nobody would ever want to do virtual memory on a microprocessor.~"
So they didn't do it. And a few years later the Motorola 68000 family (which DID have restartable instructions on memory faults) became the canonical processor for the "cheap unix box" explosion.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I heard is uses a Z80 as well.
In addition to the CP/M boards you could buy for an Atari 800 (XL, etc.), there was also a really great 3rd party disc drive (which could store a whole 180K per disc!) called the Indus GT. Which used a Z80 as a controller.
They started using one of those shitty dot-com like expressions as their company sub-name ("The Extreme Connectivity Company") and therefore, financial ruin was sure to follow. Naming your company something like that is just asking for the money to dissappear.
Bzzt. The 68000 could not completly re-execute an instruction that was aborted due to a bus error.
That's why I said the "68000 family" rather than the 68000.
Like Zilog, Motorola's first "x000" chip couldn't restart instructions that failed due to memory faults. Unlike Zilog, Motorola did a followon which COULD.
Perhaps it was more cluefulness on Motorola's part than Zilog's. Perhaps it was pressure from Sun, or their two-CPU box which PROVED that people REALLY wanted to do virtual memory with microprocessors - badly enough to put in a second expensive (in those days) CPU chip just to make it possible.
So the 68010 was the first microprocessor chip that could do true virtual memory. Combined with Unix its family became the foundation of one era of the microprocessor explosion.
This lasted until it was displaced by the horribly asymmetrical, but extremely cheap (at the time), Intel 86 family, on the (almost inadvertently) open and expandable IBM PC/clone defacto-standard platform.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
My 1985 IBM XT has a disk controller (presumably ESDI?) with a Z80 to run it, in the same way that 68000-series chips show up on RAID cards nowadays. (our mailserver at work has a disk controller more powerful than an Atari TT :) )
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
I've only seen one mention of it, but my all time favorite Z80 machine was the CP/M board for the Apple II. It was also the first product I'd ever used from a Washington-based company named Microsoft.
Shortly thereafter, I was introduced to the guy who was following Jerry Pournelle around the West Coast Computer Faire, one Bill Gates.
Amazing what can happen in twenty-odd years.
You have violated Robot's Rules of Order and will be asked to leave the future immediately.
Although your rant has merit, you picked on the wrong rantee. I work for a fabless semiconductor company architecting extremely low-cost 8051-based smartcards. And it is 8051s that own the mass 8-bit market; Z80 & HD64180 are passe. This has been the case for years, hence my original point about complete dunderheads being required to cough up that amount of money on a game plan based on a dead architecture.
Which are my two favorite uses for it. . .
Job security, gotta love it :)
There was,
LDIR Load Increat Repeat
LDI Load Increment
LDD Load Decrement
LDDR Load Decrement Repeat
but no LDIF
I cut my teeth write ZX Spectrum games in Z80 assem, and i'm very sorry to see Zilog go.
Z80s and varients are still in use in places, embedded controllers etc, and i hope someone keeps
making them
6809 RULES!
Ahem. I had a 6809 machine once, and it was a pleasure to program in assembly. 6809 also had OS/9, a multi-user multi-tasking OS which was better than any other OS for a system of the period.
And you can't dislike a processor with the opcodes BRA and SEX!
(BRanch Always, and Sign EXtend, as if you didn't know.)
"Information wants to be paid"
I learned Assembly on the Z-80 when I was about 17. I remember this attrocious manual I got from my high-school computer class teacher (a bizarre old fossil who probably did time with punch-card readers). It looked like it was written in Algeria and translated into English by drunken Thai sweatshop workers.
But, a few days later I could make the monitors on all the TRS-80's in the room flash black and white. A monumental step forward for me, but all my classmates (who spent their time learning how to format actuarial tables in BASIC) weren't impressed...
Goodbye Zilog, and thanks for the memories.
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There's more to greatness for a CPU than number of registers. The Z80 had builtin support to interface with external devices/chips (You had to wait for 6510 for that. I think 8080 always had that feature.). Its been a while, but I think you could also relocate the Z80 stack pointer, which meant you could have a virtual sized stack. (6502 choked after 255 PUSHes.) It had such a "clean" instruction set. I loathed x86 CPUs by comparison.
I've seen it mentioned, but no one has really given a reason why 6809 was "superior" or even "preferable" to the Z80. (It sure wasn't cheaper.)
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I work for a fabless semiconductor company architecting extremely low-cost 8051-based smartcards. And it is 8051s that own the mass 8-bit market; Z80 & HD64180 are passe.
Bad news: 8051s are becoming passe as better architectures like the ARM and the Atmel AVR RISC microcontrollers come on the scene.
But Z80s are still used in many devices. They aren't usually the best choice for a new design, but if the company has an existing product or existing code base, then they may well be justified. Look at how many of them TI used in their calculators (though I don't know for certain that Zilog built them).