My Z-2 Restoration Project

[Christopher Mallery]

The last couple of months I have been working on restoring a Cromemco Z-2 that was found in someone's shed.  It was in rough shape, but it is running nicely now so I figured I would show it off.

From Top to Bottom:

1. A 3D Printed Terminal running cool-retro-term

2. The small box to the left of the terminal is a prototype of my Cromemco 3102 terminal emulator that turns any VT100 terminal into a 3102 terminal.

3. 4 HxC Floppy Emulators emulating 2 DSDD 5.25" drives and 2 DSDD 8" drives

4. A custom machined panel containing a reset button, a local serial port for the console and a switch to switch between remote access and local access.

5. 4x Raspberry Pis that provide remote telnet access to the console and the rest of the Cromix terminals.  One of them also acts as a parallel printer emulator.  One of them has the ability to reset the system remotely too.

6. Power Distribution

7. The Z-2 itself which contains:

• ZPU
• 256KZ
• WDI-II
• 3x TU-ARTs
• 4FDC with a FDCX4 Reproduction installed

It currently runs a 3 terminal Z80 Cromix system.  My end goal is a 6 terminal Cromix system, but I need to find another 256KZ board to make it happen.  I would also love to put a DPU in it, but that is just a nice to have.  I also need to finish my 7710 drive emulator to put in it.

Ok I am done showing off now. :)

[Mike Stein]

Wow! Very nice indeed; where did you find the time?

What do the Pis do, exactly?

Is it (or will it be) on line for 'public' access?

Love the terminal!

I take it there's hardware and software involved in the 3102 emulation?

Congratulations and kudos for bringing another Cromemco back to life, and so beautifully configured to boot!

m

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[Christopher Mallery]

Well I got laid off in January.  Thankfully I found a new job pretty quickly, but I had about 3 months I needed to keep myself busy, lol.

The 1st Pi provides telnet access to the console via a program called ser2net.  It also has a custom Pi hat that is wired into the reset circuitry so that I can remotely reset the box.

The 2nd Pi is connected to the rest of the TU-ARTs providing a pool of ser2net connections, 1 for each Cromix tty.  They can also be used in CDOS for things like XModem.

The 3rd one is currently a spare.

The 4th has a retroprinter hat installed which emulates an Epson dot matrix printer and is lpt1 in Cromix.  Print jobs spit out as PDF files on a file share.

Yes, the plan is there will be public access!

Currently the 3102 is hardware + software, but I am working on a software only version that would be some form of serial proxy.  It started as hardware because the project started as a SWTPC CT-1024 emulator that was capable of driving the SWTPC AC-30 Cassette Interface and the platform proved useful in emulating the 3102,  but there is no strict reason for the hardware component for the 3102.

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/cromemco/CAHHfo1s5OXLxs-7VZrMebSxXtdNCcBTffB%3Dd3G1dkviDaDvBpg%40mail.gmail.com.