Re: TI-H: General questions with a possibly big im


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Re: TI-H: General questions with a possibly big im




>So, I was wondering: you said lots of people sell Z80 microproccesors?
>do they sell them singly?  

Only Zilog sells the microprocessors...  Hitachi and Toshiba both make
embedded Z80 microcontrollers with added support peripherals and
extended instruction sets.  But, unfortunately, the Z80 is dead in
terms of mainstream offerings and it is only still around because it
was so popular in the 70's and early 80's.  In a sense, only the
instruction set has survived, no any of the hardware.

>I dont think Zilog does.  Maybe, i dont know.
> I fthey did, i could slap that on a baord, with power supply,
>oscillator, and a big wide bus to put stuff on containing all of the 40
>pins from the processor.  With the Low profile thingies in computers, i
>can put SIM like memory modules in theri depending on how I want it
>setup.  A 2K System Rom would be sufficent, for all it has to do is load
>up the actual shell from the memory expander built in to the system.  It
>could be a very simple expander, for it can work 8 bits at a time,
>instead of serially.  The shell can do the rest.  The hard parts would
>be getting the ROM done.  I dont know if companies do this for consumers
>on a small scale basis, or if i could do it myslef, id ont know.
>another problem would be the video.  If we chose th TI way, we would
>need dual access RAM for the video RAM, and i dont know if/where they
>sell that, or how expensive it is.

I don't think it's dual ported ram, unless they do some weird SRAM
redirecting from inside the MCU.  It's most likely a non-maskable
interrupt service routine that accesses the SRAM.  

-Mel


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