Watching a Z80 from an RP2350 | Hacker News Reader

Watching a Z80 from an RP2350

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54 pointsibobev9 comments

I think that 7 decades's worth of telly and movie set designers will take issue with the claimed uselessness of blinkenlichten. Blinkenlichten make money. (-:

Is it difficult to hook microcontrollers together?

My outside understanding was that you match the voltage ranges of the pins via a level shifter, and then match the sampling rate with a dedicated clock pin?

I guess what I'm asking is, this is cool, but what problem does it solve?

So, what problems does it solve? In this case, it gives the Z80 an amazing co-processor that will push the Z80 itself, into the stratosphere of modern connectivity.

The RP2350 can be used with older, 8-bit computers, to really open up the world to them.

It is the ultimate upgrade/accessory co-processor, for Z80, 6502, 68000-based retro- computing/alternative-platform based designs and so on..

Oh, for a retro-computing nerd, the RP2350 has solved so, so many problems!

The biggest bug-bear for retro computers is: storage (and also connectivity).

For example, in my retro collection I have machines where the RP2350 has given these 8-bit computers access to as much as 32 gigabytes of storage - and in many cases that is many, many, many times of a multiple too much space, even if you put everything that was ever written for the 8-bit computer, on the SD card.

However, if you have ever hacked on a retro computer, you will know that storage is everything, and having everything that was ever released/made available for any particular platform one might curate, is simply a delight.

The RP2350 has opened that vista wide.

Why wouldn't you just emulate a Z80 on the RP2350 at that point?

Same reason you wouldn't just emulate a Z80 on a desktop. People don't build retros because they're practical.

Some people certainly do: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47708041

Why is this written as a marketing spiel instead of just, you know, answering the question?

Having a high level I/O processor chip would be a nice thing to have for the vintage market.

Something akin to what the CH376 does to make it easy to attach DOS based USB storage, but something that goes further. Like easy to be a generic USB host rather than something dedicated like the CH376 is.

Something that gives you an 8-bit bus to SPI and I2C and Ethernet/WiFi etc. SPI is trivial, but bit banging it with an 8-bit CPU is glacial. UARTs are faster.

A regular RPi would work, just that the idea of having to boot Linux on my "I/O processor" makes me itch. I'm sure you can go bare metal.

And, sure "what's the point", but I just view the I/O Super Co-processor in the same vein as a SCSI controller chip. Simple protocol to the chip, and the chip does the heavy lifting of the actual SCSI bus.

This chip does more heavy lifting.

It's basically a really powerful logic analyzer. Excellent for debugging.

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