Nathan's Z80 Project Mark 2: Overview

I've actually started building this Z80 project already, so this one might get to do something more than just a debug pattern on some LEDs. The design for this is fairly minimal and is based around two main factors; stuff I've done or planned before (so understand to a certain degree) and parts I have lying around. As such the components might be a bit odd, and possibly unavailable (sorry).

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Giving the Z80 a good boot

Booting computers is an age old problem. It seems like an easy task to you, just press the button, but the software and hardware involved is often a bit of a hack. When you start a Z80 processor (ignoring reset hold times and clock stability for the moment) it will try to load an instruction from memory address 0, execute it then move on. So the traditional way Z80 micro computers (like the Sinclair ZX Spectrum and the Amstrad NC100, to name a couple I own) are built is with a ROM chip at the bottom of the address space with some kind of operating system on it, e.g. a BASIC interpreter.

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