RC2014 - Z80-Computer
published 29.03.2016
The RC2014 is a Z80 computer developed by Spencer Owen. The standard configuration consists of the Z80 CPU, 32KiB RAM, 8KiB EPROM and a UART interface. A Microsoft Basic is stored on the ROM, which is started immediately.
My replica was made on my own backplane board and in my own case:
Beside a veroboard flash card, which works as a replacement for the original EPROM plug-in card, I built an I/O board, which provides 8 digital inputs and outputs.
On the software side I wrote a crt0.s for the SDCC compiler. This makes it possible to write C code for the RC2014. A bootloader, which uses my driver implementation for the UART chip, was also written to avoid having to remove the flash chip over and over again. A (slower) sideloading of C code via the Basic interpreter in the original ROM is also possible. This makes it possible to execute binaries on the hardware without hardware modifications.