Z80 Memories
Chris Fenton has built a machine. It’s a multi-core Z80 monster in a beautiful laser-cut wooden case. I have nothing but deep admiration for this kind of project and the drive that lets people drive and complete it. It also brings back a lot of memories.
The Z80 was the first CPU I learned how to program assembly for, back in the Nineties, on an Amstrad PCW. The operating system on that one was CP/M Plus, but you could also boot (boot!) a text processor named LocoScript. The programming language of choice ended up being Turbo Pascal 3.0.
What bothered me was that I couldn’t let stuff run “in parallel”, so I hacked my way into something resembling that. Pretty much all low-level functions would make calls to the operating system entry point, at memory address 0005. (The assembly instruction for that was CD 05 00. Yes, I still remember that.) So I inserted a jump table at that address that would call all the Pascal procedures I wanted to run in parallel before proceeding with the low-level operating system call.
I quickly figured out (the hard way) that those Pascal procedures better contain no calls to low-level operating system routines, because ... infinite loop. Oopsie.
Tags: the-nerdy-bit, hacking