Hey;
I was reading something the other day about being able to hand-clock a
Z80, that it was so stable (due to not using dynamic registers,
apparently) that with the appropriate debounce circuit you could literally
manually step it through instructions.
Single stepping at the bus cycle level is actually quite common, and can
be done on many CPUs (even those with dynamic registers). Rather than
slow the clock down, you effectively include a lot of wait states so that
each bus cycle is held for as long as you want.
Is this as rare as it sounds?
Not really.
Has anyone -tried- hand-clocking a Z80?
I think I have. I've certaijnly hand-stepped a PDP11/45 at the T-state
level, buit that doesn't really count in that the machine was designed to
let you do that...
-tony