Canvasing opinions?

[Daniel Lower]

Hi,

I'm a potential RC2014 builder and user. Daniel age 52.  I went to the Centre of Computing History in Cambridge last year the Retro Computer festival and saw the RC2014 with the nice blue front panel case. A few nice points:

• Found Ben Eaters youtube feed on building a 6502 on breadboards I thought that's nice but it won't exactly be very useful when finished. A plus for you, you do end up with something nice and robust when finished. Also made me think has anyone made a clock module with stepping ability?
  
  
• There are other kits of course but haven't seen anything with the back plane idea which I think is great. I see folks even making a ZX Spectrum and 6502 module and even a ez80 module though that one is an oven job to solder.
  

So a few questions.

1) The biggy was all the soldering worth it?  That 12 slot board looks great but what alot of joints. For me I can imagine there will be joy if you get it to see the mandelbrot set rendered on a computer you've built or play chess or Conways game of life.

Is it one of the devices you would grab in a fire? I could well see that.

2) I'm trying to decide on the Mini II and a back plane 5/8 combo or go for the Zed. What do you use it for when done? The extra slots I mean.

3) Has anyone wired up a temperature and humidity sensor? It strikes me as a great setup for a datalogger. But then perhaps it's overpowered for that. I researched but it doesn't play nicely I gather with SPI and I2C?

4) One thought it can be a very isolated unit. What  about a personal journal ? I can imagine there is a CP/M app for that but can't find it. What's the best place for CP/M apps? I found https://www.cpm.z80.de/binary.html 

5) I was born in 72 I started with Atari Basic actually. I do know C but was never of the Forth, COBOL era. Assembly language has some appeal if it progresses nicely is an 80286 containing instructions from the 8080 and hence Z80 series?  

6) How far can the knowledge take you would you recognise instructions from a 486, Pentium in the Z80?

7) Anyone put inside the case? Is it a joyous thing to have on your desk? What do you use the LCD for? 

8) There's bound to be software that is realistic time critical anything come to mind? I have the Agon emulator on my PC which of course runs ez80 and potentially very fast clock speed though it has the not complete CP/M as I understand.

I have been contemplating the FPGA route but think I'll probably miss out on a lot of old charm and satisfcation that route. I'd better stop it's a message already.

Thanks for any feedback.

Is there a discord? That might be better.

[Peter Onion]

Hi Daniel,

Some answers to your questions.  All IMO/IME...

1) You don't need to mount all twelve bus connectors to start with.  If you begin with  CPU & RAM+ROM & Clock & Serial/CF then you need only solder in five  of the bus sockets.  Having said that I started with building the back plane when I built my Zed Pro.  That way I was "ready to go" when I had built the boards.

2) I have a mixture of extra kit boards (PPIDE & CF & RTC) and homebrew board  (VDU+PS/2 keyboard  & Parallel ports + LED Address Bus "blinkenlights") so I've only got three slots left :-).

3) I don't know.  It might be worth looking for an SPI or I²C board to communicate with multiple such devices.

4)  Lots of CP/M applications on the various archive sites such as http://cpmarchives.classiccmp.org/

5) Child of the early 1960s here, so grew up with homebrewed Z80 systems rather than anything commercial.

6) All the machines of that era have lots of similarities.  I find biggest problem is remembering which instructions belong to each machine.

7) Mine sits on the desk unboxed mainly because my prototype VDU card is oversized (too tall) to fit in a box.  One day I will design a smaller PCB for it.

8) You get used to the "pauses" while programs compile for example, and you find things to do in them (like tidy the bench, put books back on the shelf, make cups of tea, choose next music to listen to etc. )

It's all about having fun.

PeterO  

[Mark Cohen]

There are several pcbs you can get made to house the Ben Eater circuits. Also the backplane would take about 2.5 hours to solder together. You would probably want to run romWBW so I think the bigger kits would be a better choice

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[Alan Cox]

1. If you've had a bit of soldering practice then the backplane is tedious but not difficult and pretty much all the boards are well spaced and labelled. There are some third party smaller systems like the SC130 etc that are much easier to build

2. If you get into it then you can't have enough slots. My biggest system actually has a special card I designed to allow for 20+ slots by chaining boards with buffers. The standard ones though you can extend with a second backplane

3. There is no SPI or I2C hardware in the Z80. The Z180 based boards can do SPI sort of out of the box. There are add on I2C controller cards although you can bitbang I2C and SPI with GPIO ports so it's not a huge problem except for high speeds.

4. Not sure on journal apps

5. 8080/Z80 is very different for 80x86 programming architecture but the basics of asm don't really change that much and if you've experience of the 8086 nightmare of "operation A only works on register B" you'll feel at home with Z80 ;) C compilers exist both cross and native, along with Pascal, COBOL and some quite surprising stuff like LISP.

6. By that point the whole programming universe is quite different. Plenty of skills transfer but the entire mindset is IMHO different

7. Not the official case but a case is useful if for example you have a cat that things RC2014 boards are for rubbing up against

8. Just like today. It's just that you set something building and grab a tea versus firing up steam and discovering your game is going to spend 45 minutes on a mandatory update whilst you do the garden.

One reason I prefer to work on MP/M or other multi-tasking environments as I can build on one console and do stuff on the others.

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[Mark Pruden]

Hi there, welcome to the community

2) also you might want to take a look at “Small computer central” they offer a number of RCBus kits in lots of different form factors, to suit most needs

3) you might want to consider the Z180 cpu it is a Z80 with a lot of inbuilt peripherals , including SPI support on the chip, it means few external components, and commonly used for SD cards. 

6) the Z80 while a product , you might say was a fork / enhanement of the 8080. To differentiate they came up with new syntax for instructions e.g MOV for 8080 is LD in Z80. 

So while the code reads differently the overall structure is the same, since the z80 is backwards compatible.

 But if you compare with a modern 80x86 processor they are quite different simply because the complexity of modern x86 is so much greater, and the assemblers used are so much more capable. but yes you still might recognise some code elements.

[Alan Cox]

6) the Z80 while a product , you might say was a fork / enhanement of the 8080. To differentiate they came up with new syntax for instructions e.g MOV for 8080 is LD in Z80. 

Interestingly it was not to differentiate but at the time there was a view that a set of instruction set names might be copyrightable and Intel were not terribly pleased about the Z80 so it was done for legal reasons.

There is an early 8080 like Z80 instruction mnemonic set but very very little supported it and it's a wonderful historical obscurity.

So while the code reads differently the overall structure is the same, since the z80 is backwards compatible.

Almost. There are some subtle cases where you can get burned as with the original 8080 Microsoft BASIC which broke on Z80.

Alan

 

[Christer Karlsson]

Hi Daniel,

1) I started with the pro version, as I was not proficient with soldering, the backplane was a great start. It allowed me to practice without having to be worried I would damage something.  I went slow and easy, I soldered the two outmost pins first, and then made sure all the connectors were perpendicular to the plane, and then I soldered all the other pins. I should be honest it was time consuming, but it quickly increased my soldering proficiency, and it was far easier than to for example get all the toggle switches on the PiDP11 soldered and straight.

2) I would go for the pro board. There are several modules out there that use the Enhanced bus, and a 5/8 combo would not allow you to use those. I actually later built a RC2014 Zed, but quickly upgraded that with a pro board (so now I have a RC2014 pro, and a RC2014 pro.... the mail service and UK and US are living good on me ;).

3) Not done any of  temperature and humidity sensor, but I have built modules for both a SAA1099 and a TMS 5220 (btw these are sometimes a hit and miss when you order from China), but it sounds like a project that would be fun to try. Adafruit have sensors that they claim behaves under I2C, and Small Computer Central has a RCBUS compatible I2C bus master module so I think it could be possible.

4) I use https://www.cpm.z80.de/binary.html for my CP/M applications, but there was a post not too long time ago, with a link to a pretty large library of applications (can't find it right now).

5) There are lots compilers available.

6) I think you will recognize some, but the biggest problem when you reach 486 and Pentium where these LONG combined instructions or who can forget the different multi-byte NOP. Z80 is a CISC, but far from the level that x86 became and still is.

7) My ZED pro is in a case, mostly because it has matured to the level I want it at.  It protects the cards and I like the front panel option for RomWBW. My Pro is just sitting on my desk as it is (well I have standoffs between the card to avoid them rubbing up agaist each other).

8) My code is often not that long, I also most often use a cross-compiler and compile the code on my 'modern' machine and then transfer the executable over.

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[sunnyboy010101]

1) The biggy was all the soldering worth it?  That 12 slot board looks great but what alot of joints. For me I can imagine there will be joy if you get it to see the mandelbrot set rendered on a computer you've built or play chess or Conways game of life.

Is it one of the devices you would grab in a fire? I could well see that.

<ME> I love soldering circuit boards. I love these kits because living in Canada electronic parts are not as easy to come by as in other countries. In many cases you need to buy 10+ (or 1000+) to even place an order. A kit comes with all the parts and ready to solder. I love the RC2014 kits from Spencer Owen, but also built all the PiDP kits from Oscar V. (PiDP8, PiDP11, PiDP10) and the kits from Chris Davis, The High Nibble, and many others. I like the Z80 kits best because I grew up in the z80 age - again in Canada the TRS80 was more affordable than the Apples or Commodores (PET). I still  have my TRS80-4P with all software.

2) I'm trying to decide on the Mini II and a back plane 5/8 combo or go for the Zed. What do you use it for when done? The extra slots I mean.

<ME> I started small and regretted it. I bought the Zed with 8slot backplane and ultimately had to buy the 12 slot plane separate to get all the stuff I wanted. My opinion is to buy the Zed with the 12-slot backplane and you have all you will need for some time. And yes, get the case (see below).

3) Has anyone wired up a temperature and humidity sensor? It strikes me as a great setup for a datalogger. But then perhaps it's overpowered for that. I researched but it doesn't play nicely I gather with SPI and I2C?

<ME> Not here, but one of the systems of the 1990s I had (and still have) was the TINI - a java powered single board that used the 1-wire specification to talk to all kinds of 1-wire sensors including humidity and temp. I even built the weather station for it. Very cool board for the time.

4) One thought it can be a very isolated unit. What  about a personal journal ? I can imagine there is a CP/M app for that but can't find it. What's the best place for CP/M apps? I found https://www.cpm.z80.de/binary.html 

<ME> I built a wordpress blog years and years ago, but don't keep it as up to date as I used to. Yes, blogging is a great way to connect.

5) I was born in 72 I started with Atari Basic actually. I do know C but was never of the Forth, COBOL era. Assembly language has some appeal if it progresses nicely is an 80286 containing instructions from the 8080 and hence Z80 series?  

<ME> Born in 1955, child of the '60s (to quote a Nancy Griffith song) and took Engineering, so learned FORTRAN first, then PL/1, then C, then C++ then Java. Somewhere in there I also picked up Perl, HTML, CSS, python and php. I actually teach computer programming at a Canadian university (distance ed).

6) How far can the knowledge take you would you recognise instructions from a 486, Pentium in the Z80?

<ME> similarites but nothing specific to take over. What you do retain and use is the ability to "think in assembly" which really means thinking like a computer. That's why it's hard for some to jump between the motorola chips and the intel chips (different thinking essentially). I did a hardware course in the '90s using the Motorola 68HC11 (MIT handyboard) so I do know some motorola assembler, but I love the Z80 stuff. Once you get to intel PC boxes, I found C the more fun language to deal with hardware.

7) Anyone put inside the case? Is it a joyous thing to have on your desk? What do you use the LCD for? 

<ME> YES. I absolutely LOVE it. I wrote a C program that controls the LCD and can display any text I want. The newer OS from Wayne W. also uses the LCD more than the version I stared with. Mine sits in a place of honor on the back left corner of my desk (full view). It connects over WIFI (using the wifi board) so I can connect from my development PC and also is plugged into a very old MAC mini for dedicated serial communication.

8) There's bound to be software that is realistic time critical anything come to mind? I have the Agon emulator on my PC which of course runs ez80 and potentially very fast clock speed though it has the not complete CP/M as I understand.

<ME> Not something I'm totally aware of. I do like real-time operating systems (RTOS) and also anything that's a Finite State Machine, but that's about it.

I have been contemplating the FPGA route but think I'll probably miss out on a lot of old charm and satisfcation that route. I'd better stop it's a message already.

<ME> Just bought the Terasic DE-10 and created the MiSTer last month. I love it. What I love most is that it does not emulate, but rather reconfigures the gate array to mimic the actual machine in a more accurate way (at least for me). I was never a big fan of emulation; I prefer the actual hardware when I can. (I've had real HP9000s, IBM RS6000, Lisa, Mac+, Apple II ( C & G), TRS COCO and of course the TRS 1, 3, 4 and finally 4P. I missed out on an Apollo system and always "just missed" any PDP11s. Now getting said older hardware is just getting harder and harder. Likewise I doubt I'll ever get a real Hammond B3 (cost and many other factors). <sigh>

[Olev Toom]

Hello Daniel!

Welcome!

1. Sure the 12-slot backplane is worth soldering. You always are short of one slot (like of one wall outlet).

2. Soon you'll to try the ROMWBW with the front panel, LCD display etc. See 1.

5. On the RC2014, you will try all the languages. But if you know x86 language then you'll learn Z80/8080 assembly languages very quickly.

7. I have a "regular" RC2014 that sits naked on the table, and a ROMWBW machine that is encased. If you do not swap modules every day then a case is recommended. The LCD gives some information about the machine but the main reason I obtained it was the possibility to program it by myself.

Best,

olev

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[Daniel Lower]

Hi,

Thanks Sunny. So far I'm getting 

1) 12 pane is definitely worth it you just grow into it. I'm there already with:

1 CPU
2 512k RAM 512k ROM https://z80kits.com/shop/512k-rom-512k-ram-module/ 
3 Dual Serial
4 Dual Clock
5 Compact Flash Card for OS
6 USB #1 for storage yes need ZedPro and romWBW 
7 USB #2 for backup storage 
8 Front Panel Module for case
9 Digital IO Module, well looks fun to me
10 TMS9918A video module well after https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBD8SCSGs4g&t=1s and 

 
11 SID Sound board which I see is commodore 64 
12 Dual Paddle Analog controller  https://z80kits.com/shop/dual-paddle-analogue-module/ well pong, space invaders, missile command all those good ones.

2) Soldering is only partially required for 12 board anyway as you only need to solder what you're using at the time so may as well go that route, 

3)  Unique selling point I came up with is that it's the perfect confidential data computer for nuclear launch codes, formula for calculating prime numbers log (n), NOC lists, remember Mission Impossible.

Changing a disk may be easy enough upside down. I'd love to see Tom Cruise try to wire up a USB serial port upside down and in silence too so no muttering damm I've got tx and rx back to front :-).

4) So my journal / diary idea: well there's always dbase 2. I wonder if 3 will work. I guess dbase IV is out of the question. Dbase 2 seems limited to 1000 characters a record.  http://www.retroarchive.org/cpm/dbase/dbase.htm 

I guess I should be looking for CP/M 2.2 80 binaries? If keeping important data on it would want easy backups. I see it's possible to have two USB card modules per machine. https://z80kits.com/shop/ch375-usb-storage-module/

That retroarchive also has a Whatsit database which is mentioned in here history of the personal computer https://archive.org/details/A_History_of_the_Personal_Computer/eBook01 which might be my ticket as it's described as a freeform database.

5) I found lovely amber terminal software https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term?tab=readme-ov-file also does green screen which with minicom would work. Would love to have a real amber terminal but crt doesn't half take up alot of space.

6) On the programs that run at real speed. What I was getting at was why not run CP/M at 1474.556Mhz 200 times faster than the original. That's extreme but I gather the ez80 can run at up to 20Mhz and with other tricks is equivalent to a 150Mhz regular Z80.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zilog_eZ80  for a significant increase in experience.

That's all so far. 

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[Alan Cox]

3)  Unique selling point I came up with is that it's the perfect confidential data computer for nuclear launch codes, formula for calculating prime numbers log (n), NOC lists, remember Mission Impossible.

Alas not. The tempest protection is zero and the emissions from it are horrible. That's one reason I cased mine in a metal box 8)

 

4) So my journal / diary idea: well there's always dbase 2. I wonder if 3 will work. I guess dbase IV is out of the question. Dbase 2 seems limited to 1000 characters a record.  http://www.retroarchive.org/cpm/dbase/dbase.htm 

Dbase 3 was a C language rewrite for DOS. Only DBase 2/Vulcan existed for CP/M (there is no Dbase 1 - the initial product was called 2 so it would sound trustworthy and established ;) )

 

I guess I should be looking for CP/M 2.2 80 binaries? If keeping important data

Yes

 

There are Z80 emulators (eg Udo Munk's) that run at the equivalent of 2GHz Z80 on PC. If you wrote one as a JIT you'd probably get around 10GHz Z80 equivalent but that would start to get really silly.

It's also a bit pointless if you want the real experience!

 

[Mark Pruden]

4) the ultimate in free format databases has got to be the humble text editor/ word processor. Back in the day it’s probably what most people used for such a task

Fyi as a child of 68, first Experian e was on Trs80 (clone) which had sophisticated word processing, including proportional fonts.

[Phillip Stevens]

On Wednesday, 18 June 2025, Daniel Lower wrote:

I'm a potential RC2014 builder and user. Daniel age 52.  I went to the Centre of Computing History in Cambridge last year the Retro Computer festival and saw the RC2014 with the nice blue front panel case. A few nice points:

• Found Ben Eaters youtube feed on building a 6502 on breadboards I thought that's nice but it won't exactly be very useful when finished. A plus for you, you do end up with something nice and robust when finished. Also made me think has anyone made a clock module with stepping ability?
  

Yes. JB Lang has a z80ctrl Module that does what you are thinking about.

https://github.com/jblang/z80ctrl

• There are other kits of course but haven't seen anything with the back plane idea which I think is great. I see folks even making a ZX Spectrum and 6502 module and even a ez80 module though that one is an oven job to solder.
  

Probably, IMHO, the ZXNext is the most professional solution of the Z80 based "kits". As it is FPGA based there are also cpu cores being made for Sinclair QL 68020 and Commodore64, so if your interest is software that makes a great platform to think about too.

https://www.specnext.com

So a few questions.

1) The biggy was all the soldering worth it?  That 12 slot board looks great but what alot of joints. For me I can imagine there will be joy if you get it to see the mandelbrot set rendered on a computer you've built or play chess or Conways game of life.

Is it one of the devices you would grab in a fire? I could well see that.

Yes, soldering is zen. But try not to inhale too much flux smoke, otherwise things can get super zen. ;-)

2) I'm trying to decide on the Mini II and a back plane 5/8 combo or go for the Zed. What do you use it for when done? The extra slots I mean.

My preference would be to get two Backplane 8 modules. The single row backplane is much easier to manage for insertion and removal of Modules, and you'll be doing a lot of that. Two backplanes allows you to have a "reference" and a "workhorse" so you can write and test stuff across a number of different configurations. For example, one "Classic" and one "Pro".

And, I'd suggest that 90% of the fun of the RC2014 (once you've soldered it up) is to write your own code, either in assembly, C or one of the other languages for which there are compilers for Z80. Otherwise it becomes just an expensive display piece, to play an occasional game of Zork.

3) Has anyone wired up a temperature and humidity sensor? It strikes me as a great setup for a datalogger. But then perhaps it's overpowered for that. I researched but it doesn't play nicely I gather with SPI and I2C?

The Z180 is reasonably good at SPI, though you have to bit reverse the transmissions. More here.

https://groups.google.com/g/retro-comp/c/u_bzmkMvyDU

I have built an I2C solution using a somewhat obsolete device, the Philips PCA9665. But it is not in the RC2014 family.

I2C does work with a whole lot of sensors and actuators. So it would be good if it could be more widely supported.

https://github.com/z88dk/z88dk/tree/master/libsrc/_DEVELOPMENT/target/yaz180/device/pca9665

https://github.com/z88dk/z88dk/tree/master/libsrc/_DEVELOPMENT/target/yaz180/driver/i2c/z180

 

5) I was born in 72 I started with Atari Basic actually. I do know C but was never of the Forth, COBOL era. Assembly language has some appeal if it progresses nicely is an 80286 containing instructions from the 8080 and hence Z80 series?  

Although the mnemonics (z80 vs 8086) are different most of the instructions are fairly similar. Intel tried to make sure that the 8080 instructions were available on the 8086 (even to the extent of hiding extremely useful instructions on the 8085 that were NOT available on the 8086), to make porting code over to the 8086 easy.

YMMV, but I find the Zilog mnemonics much more sensible than the Intel variant. For example, the Intel MOV instruction doesn't actually move register contents, it loads register contents and therefore Zilog LD mnemonic seems more logical. But that's just my 2c.

6) How far can the knowledge take you would you recognise instructions from a 486, Pentium in the Z80?

There's a lot of carry over. For example when the "row-hammer" bug was being discussed, it was easy to see (with Z80/8080 in mind) what was going on in the Pentium 40 years later.

 

7) Anyone put inside the case? Is it a joyous thing to have on your desk? What do you use the LCD for?

For my purposes a case is pointless. I'd be opening it up multiple times per session to change Modules for different configurations. It depends whether your RC2014 is a "trophy" or a "tool". In my case I use it as a tool to play with code.

I have been contemplating the FPGA route but think I'll probably miss out on a lot of old charm and satisfcation that route. I'd better stop it's a message already.

For developing code it is very useful to have an emulator. There are a few around, but I use z88dk-ticks all the time. It is useful for debugging, and for optimisation as it can count ticks between breakpoints and of course you can single step into any routine to see register contents.

https://github.com/z88dk/z88dk/blob/master/README.md

Hope that's useful.

Cheers, P.

 

[Jeff Ratliff]

My unpopular opinion is to start with an RC2014 Classic II and build up from there.  A Classic II can be built into a Pro with a CP/M upgrade and a couple other boards. 

The reason is that a Classic II is pretty easy to understand, but a Zed is not. There are just too many variables and too many chances for mistakes on the bigger systems. Just search the group for threads from people who started with a Zed or a Pro and couldn't get it to work.

Taking a slower approach helps to learn the system gradually. A lot of your questions would have been answered in the process because they are in the documentation.  Once you have a working system it'll be easier to see what else you need to do to get to your goal. 

I guess I'm saying do Agile, not Waterfall, if that makes sense. 

[Daniel Lower]

Hi, Alan,

Blimey are you the Alan Cox of Linux fame bearded kernel maintianer sure look like him with the beard :-). 

I've been costing the way of building it gradually as recommended by a couple of people here compared to going Zed pro.

Turns out it's only £24 if can daisy chain 2 x 8 back planes together and you don't have a need to run an old line printer. 

Did you write that up anywhere? 

Thought was interesting.

[Alan Cox]

On Sat, 21 Jun 2025 at 20:42, Daniel Lower <daniel...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi, Alan,

Blimey are you the Alan Cox of Linux fame bearded kernel maintianer sure look like him with the beard :-). 

I might be 8)

 

I've been costing the way of building it gradually as recommended by a couple of people here compared to going Zed pro.

Turns out it's only £24 if can daisy chain 2 x 8 back planes together and you don't have a need to run an old line printer. 

Did you write that up anywhere? 

Two backplanes works with nothing special. Some of the designs of backplane are specifically built so you can put angled connectors on the end slot. Three backplanes you have to start messing with buffers. At least for a Z80 and 74HCT parts at 7.3MHz.

https://smallcomputercentral.com/rcbus/modular-backplanes/

[7alken]

hi, very cool informative thread, almost worth to pin it :-)