I’ve had this item on my to do list since 1991 and at the time I got hold of some great books on the topic and sketched out some basic designs I never found the time to design/build my very own Single Board Computer (SBC).
At the time I wanted to build either a 6502 or Z80 SBC and even learnt some Z80 assembly (already had 6502 under control) in the event I got to the build part.
A few months ago I built the MyZ80 (also known as RC2014 mini) SBC and had such a fun time I thought I build another… This time around I order the Elite SC131 from Small Computer Central.
The design is compact and when fitted in the Elite case sits beautifully on my desk next to my Mac Mini. A few features of the SC131 is that it comes complete with CPM 2.2 installed in ROM, along with MBASIC, TBASIC and Forth.
Features:
* Z180 CPU
* 512K RAM
* 512K ROM (RomWBW installed)
* Duel serial ports
* SD Card storage
So I built the SC131 (easy to follow instructions) and had the whole computer up in under 2 hours. Booted CPM and configured the SD Card and installed a few classic Infocom text adventures to test that all was working fine, and before long I was ‘West of House’.
So where to from here?
Well I think I’ll dig deeper in the old world of CPM, something that I really haven’t used since 1986 on Kaypro and then very little on my Commodore C128 and write a few programs in BASIC, Forth, C and Assembler.