1 Dec
2010
1 Dec
'10
11:16 a.m.
On 30 Nov 2010 at 19:44, Tony Duell wrote:
_Precisely_. I know you were being sarcastic, but actually, that's just
my point.
For me (And for many people here), this is a hobby. We do it becasue we
enjoy it. And that means we get to pick the ways that we enjoy the most.
Of course sometimes we have to do things we don't enhoy too much, but, at
least for me, I do them becasue I know that's what's eneded to complete
the restoration, finish the design, whatever.
But If I happen to like soldering a hundred or so 14 and 16 pin DIL chips
to a bit of stripboard and connecting them up with roadrunner wire or
whatever, then, to be frank, that's my business. Doing so doesn't affect
anyone else. If you want to use an ARM microcontrolelr to do much the
smae job, well, that's your business. I am certainly not goign to try to
stop you.
You knwo, I can think of dozens of hobbies that I have no interest in.
But this doens;t mean I think the people who enjoy them are in any way
wrong. All I ask is that they let me get on with tinkering with old
computers.
-tony
It's a darn sight easier to debug something
when you know what it
should be doing and can see what it is doing. The former is much
easier to determine for a Z80 than many modern processors (where the
instructions are not necesarily executed one at a time in the order
you expect). The latter is also much easier to do on a system with
external program memory where you cvan conenct a logic analyser to the
ROM address lines.
Fine--why not just do the job with SSI TTL, or even discrete
transistors, diodes, resistors, etc.? I'm sure your junk box is full
of those and you can devise any sort of programming or lack thereof
that you desire.