In this video, I try out a pair of Qume 8″ floppy disk drives with the RC2014: Most people who have read my retrocomputing series probably have some familiarity with 3 1/2″ drives or with 5 1/4″ drives. The 8″ drive preceded the 5 1/4″. I never had the experience, having entered the computer scene …
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Building a Zeta V2 Single Board Computer
I was so impressed with the Zeta 2 design when I built my floppy controller for the RC2014 that I decided to go ahead and build a Zeta V2 as well! As you’re probably aware if you’ve read my previous blog posts, one of my recent hobbies has been retrocomputing, building computers based on the …
Read MoreZ80 Retrocomputing Part 14 – RC2014 Floppy Controller Boards
In this post, I build a couple of different floppy controllers for the RC2014, and run CP/M on them. If you haven’t read my other video on CP/M on the RC2014, please start there. Motivation Why a floppy controller when I have a perfectly good CompactFlash board? The floppy is more period accurate. If you’re …
Read MoreZ80 Retrocomputing 13 – RC2014 VFD Display Board
In this post, I interface a vacuum fluorescent display to the RC2014: Sourcing displays These vacuum fluorescent display modules can be found easily on ebay, just search for “Noritake VFD”. They’re available in a variety of different configurations from single line displays to four line displays. A word of caution about the larger displays — …
Read MoreZ80 Retrocomputing 12 – Talking Nixie Tube Clock
In this post, I assemble a bunch of RC2014 boards and make a talking Nixie Tube Clock This project Makes use of the following RC2014 boards: CPU Board Real-time clock board SP0256A-AL2 Speech Synthesizer SIO Board CTC Board Dual RAM/ROM Board Single-stepper board Here’s a diagram of how the boards all work together: I chose …
Read MoreZ80 Power-on reset circuits
If you’ve watched my recent video on the Nixie tube clock, you may have noticed that my clock didn’t have a power-on reset capability. It sat there locked up until someone flipped the reset switch. I spent some time looking over the Internet and came up with two options for reset circuits: Option 1: The …
Read MoreZ80 retrocomputing 11 – CP/M on the RC2014
In this post, I run CP/M on the RC2014 While browsing around Grant Searle’s website looking at his Z80 projects one day, I stumbled upon his CP/M project and it sounded like a great idea to reproduce this on the RC2014. Motivation CP/M is a disk operating system that was popular from the 1970s to …
Read MoreZ80 Retrocomputing 10 – RC2014 CompactFlash board
In this post, I implement a compactflash adapter for the RC2014 If you haven’t read by first blog post on the RC2014, please start there as it will provide background information, including where I purchased the kit from. Purpose If I think back to my first computing experiences, there was usually some form of storage. …
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