A Z80 Board With Very Few Parts

The Z80 is one of those old CPUs that is both obtainable and easy to work with — at least in some versions. [Doctor Volt] put together what may be the simplest possible setups to get a working Z80 system. He has the processor, of course. But everything else — clock, memory, and power — are from an Arduino Mega 2560. You could argue that’s two chips, but the board actually has several chips on it. On the other hand, you could probably pull off the same stunt with a bare ATMega 2560.

We’ve seen this done before, but usually with a few more support chips. If you are a purist, [Doctor Volt] also has some Z80 and CP/M experiments where the Arduino only acts as a disk drive for the computer and there are only two support chips. There are three videos for both projects that you can see below.

We were struck by how simple the first project was, though. Around 100 lines of source code is all it takes, and some of those are comments. The Arduino even provides the system memory (1K of it) and you initialize it by changing the memory.h file and reloading the Arduino.

The code does a bit of setup for interrupts and the clock and then just spins. The Arduino gets an interrupt on a CPU read and a different interrupt on a CPU write. All memory reads draw out of the simulated 1K RAM and memory writes go there, as well. The write code also can detect an I/O port write and sends that data to the Arduino serial port. It doesn’t appear to matter what I/O port you write to.

This reminded us of one of our favorite cheap Z80 projects. That board uses an ATMega32A in a similar way but also has external RAM. If you add a few EEPROMs to act as disk drives, it sits somewhere in the middle of the two computers from [Doctor Volt]. With so few parts, it is easy to get these 8-bit wonders in fairly small spaces.