Another year since my last update on my Z80-based single board computer. I've really not worked on it. The monitor I wrote was unreliable at reading, which made loading programs incredibly frustrating, so I kind of wandered off from it. Since then, I've got a new job, settled down into it, and started on electronics again by building a PCB to display a VGA-like signal, and by scraping the contents of a floppy disk. All psyched up and ready to attack the SBC again!
First up, it's been named Dirac, and has a github repo. The name's not particularly important, it just needed a better handle than "That Z80-based computer". Second, I finally decided to attack the unreliable serial input.
The SIO docs say that for async (RS232-like) input, if you're using the 1x serial clock, it should be synchronised to the input. I wasn't doing this. This seemed like a likely culprit. I needed to use the 16x clock mode on the SIO... but this required me to generate a 16x higher frequency clock from the CTC.
I was using the CTC in "timer mode", which prescales the counts by 16x or 256x. I was using 16x mode. In short, this prevented me from running the CTC signal fast enough for it to be 16x a sensible bit-rate for the SIO. I really wanted to run it without prescaling, but timer mode doesn't allow you to run without prescaling.
On the other hand, "counter mode" does allow you to run without prescaling, but it counts ticks on a trigger input, not clock cycles. However, if I feed the CPU clock into the (previously unused) trigger inputs, they behave rather like "timer mode" without prescale, which is pretty much what I want. Almost like they designed it like that, ahem. It would have been nice to have it as a suggested design, I guess.
So, I feed the CPU clock to the trigger lines, switch the CTC config from timer mode to counter mode, and switch the SIO from 1x to 16x clock, and everything's good and it reads serial data reliably! I make this sound straightforward, but there was plenty of faff involved.
But... not quite. Somewhere along the way, by switching CTC source, the tick rate has changed by a factor of 2, and the thing runs at 4800bps, rather than 9600. Unfortunately, the timer constant for setting up the CTC is a small odd number, so if I try to adjust it to bring the serial I/O back to 9600bps, it'll be waaaay off. I guess I'll just live with reliable 4800bps comms.
I've been reading up on CP/M, and at this point a minimal CP/M with RAM/ROM-disk is starting to look pretty plausible...
Posted 2015-01-03.