Re: Past Blast - "Wonder Woman 1984" - Corp Guy Using PET

On 4/5/25 4:05 PM, rbowman wrote:

On Sat, 5 Apr 2025 04:21:51 -0400, c186282 wrote:
 

    Haven't had an eprom programmer in a long time alas ...

 It should be easy to build one with a Pico or Arduino. I built one using
the parallel port on my Osborne 1 CP/M box. It was very disappointing when
the i386 came out and made tweaking the hardware a PITA.
 

    At THIS point, I'd rather fool with a Z80/clone board, something that
    will run CP/M-80. Alas even a floppy interface - or FDDs for that
    matter - are getting hard to come by. Boards may have to have a trick
    for using thumb drives and PRETENDING they're floppies .... not
    strictly purist, but, these days, you've gotta use what you've gotta
    use. There isn't a huge retro market, the world is orientated for the
    newest/latest whiz-bang stuff.

 I'd go that way too since the Z80 was what I worked with, along with
8080s, 8085s and Intel uCs. 6502s and 680Xs seemed a little strange to me.

   I did work with Z80s and the 65xx/68xx chips back
   in the day. The "logic" is a bit diff between those
   chips but not THAT much diff. The TI-9900 chips
   were weirder.
   I still see debate over whether the 6502 was 'better'
   than the 6809. The 6502 was envisioned as the 'improved'
   6809 by the Motorola defectors - and in some ways was.
   However they also left out some registers that were
   convenient to compiler writers. So, no verdict.
   There have been a LOT of chips - each maker convinced
   they had the Better Way. 'Transputers' were interesting,
   early easy hardware way to get parallelization.

    And just THIS week ... if in the USA you may not want to buy anything
    that comes from China. Expect a "Bolivian re-sell/brand market" soon,
    but not THIS week.

 That will be interesting. I read an article last week that Raspberries are
not affected by the tariffs. However I believe Espressif will be. The
ESP32 has been very popular since it has WiFi and BLE out of the box, is
cheap, and performs well. Elegoo is also Chinese and is a source of
Arduino clones. SunFounder is also Chinese. Those two are hobbyist
oriented but the ESP32 is used in a lot of commercial applications.
 I don't know about STMicro.  This may do good things for Microchip.
 They may be communists but they're no dummies; Vietnam is talking about
dropping all tariffs on US goods.

   Well, if you're not addicted to solder ... easy
   enough to EMULATE a Z80+CP/M - but, admittedly,
   it's just not quite the same. CP/M-*86* emulations
   will run OK on VirtualBox.
   Somewhere - eBay maybe - there are old Kaypros and
   Osbournes to be had in working condition. A modern
   PI-sized board WOULD be nice, but IMHO getting, or
   faking, the FDDs would be a little challenging.
   (checked eBay ... plenty of KayPro's ...)