All of the buildings, all of those cars
were once just a dream
in somebody's head
Mercy Street - Peter Gabriel
Picking up my series about the eZ80, “I don’t like Windows.” and “Why do you want to do/know that?” again, I decided to see if I could get the ZDS II running on Linux. This actually turned out to be rather easy, with the right hardware…
Continuing my series about the eZ80, “I don’t like Windows.” and “Why do you want to do/know that?”, I decided to see if I could make sense of the LOD file format produced by the Zilog tools.
Update: Two weeks after posting this blog post, I got a friendly message from Adrien Bertrand. Turns out, there are various projects that use the CEmu core directly. They’re only a bit hard to discover. Two examples are:
Although the Zilog ZDS II tools do their job, they definitely show their age. The main bottleneck is the C Compiler which is stuck at C89 making compiling modern C code painful if not impossible. Even when modern C code is C89 compliant it’s still no guarantee to compile (a good example is LUA). The C compiler is rather slow as well.
Having had some hands-on experience now with the SSD1963 display I was somewhat disappointed in the performance. That should not have surprised me since there are a lot of pixels to be moved around with 24 bits colour depth. That’s roughly 1 MByte of memory that needs to be addressed with a humble 8 bits CPU. Even when it would run at 50 MHz, optimized assembly code is required and tricks to get the optimal results. And even then it probably would disappoint. There is a reason why our old…
Cocoacrumbs