Microcomputers for Homebrew Projects?

tengwar asks: "Way back when I was at university, I did a course on microcomputers which went into enough detail to design, build and program a Z80-based system - more or less state of the art at the time. Now that my lecture notes are firmly embedded in the Carboniferous layer, I'd like to have a go at doing this with a more modern chip, and I wondered what's available. I'm not brilliant at electronics, and I liked the way the Z80 peripheral chips integrated easily with the CPU. Obviously I'm not looking to just slot together the latest PC motherboard with the latest Pentium, but I'd need to go for something where the board design won't get too complicated, which probably rules out processors with full 32-bit external interfaces on space grounds. I'm not really concerned about performance, but it would be nice to be able to port a JRE to it rather than working entirely in assembler. Any thoughts on suitable starting points?"

Comments

ARMBoards

[brejc8]

We have made a few ARM Boards to teach undergraduate students. They work with ARM Angel or with our own debugger KMD. You can write code in asm or C or any even gcc front end (inc java).
The best feature for me is the huge FPGA's to play around with. Its quite easy to pick up any electronic equipment and plug it into it. Lots of fun and great experience gaining stuff.
The board total was around 100 GBP (inc board manufacture and mounting) and I think if you ask nicely the designs will be available.

Alternatively you could use something like a 6809 or an 8051 but then writing code for them is a pain. The best idea if you use someting old is to emulate a better processor. You can then run your favorite ARM/MIPS/x86 code on an emulation and forget the real system.