In this video, I design and build a Z180 CPU Board for the RC2014 Motivation I wanted to try a CPU that runs at faster clock speeds and has more built-in peripherals than the Z80. More built in peripherals means less external boards needed for mundane features, and more room in the backplane for “interesting …

I set out to build a fancier CPU board: Design I wanted the CPU board to have the following features: on-board oscillator, so that a separate clock board is not necessary power-on reset circuit reset header for external reset switch status LEDs for common signals such as RD, WR, MREQ, IOREQ, M1, and HALT Below …

I this video, I install a Unix variant called Fuzix on the RC2014: No new hardware is introduced in this video, I use the same Flash-ROM/RAM board that I used for RomWBW. Thanks to William Sowerbutts for pointing me to the distribution and helping me along with a few issues. There were a couple of …

In this video, I build a new Flash ROM / RAM board and use it to install the RomWBW CP/M distribution on the RC2014: I’ve already done one video on CP/M on the RC2014, but when I built the Zeta 2 Single Board Computer, I liked Sergey Kiselev’s design so much that I thought I’d …

In this video, I try out a pair of Qume 8″ floppy disk drives with the RC2014: Most people who have read my retrocomputing series probably have some familiarity with 3 1/2″ drives or with 5 1/4″ drives. The 8″ drive preceded the 5 1/4″. I never had the experience, having entered the computer scene …

In this post, I build a couple of different floppy controllers for the RC2014, and run CP/M on them. If you haven’t read my other video on CP/M on the RC2014, please start there. Motivation Why a floppy controller when I have a perfectly good CompactFlash board? The floppy is more period accurate. If you’re …

In this post, I interface a vacuum fluorescent display to the RC2014: Sourcing displays These vacuum fluorescent display modules can be found easily on ebay, just search for “Noritake VFD”. They’re available in a variety of different configurations from single line displays to four line displays. A word of caution about the larger displays — …

In this post, I assemble a bunch of RC2014 boards and make a talking Nixie Tube Clock This project Makes use of the following RC2014 boards: CPU Board Real-time clock board SP0256A-AL2 Speech Synthesizer SIO Board CTC Board Dual RAM/ROM Board Single-stepper board Here’s a diagram of how the boards all work together: I chose …