Richard J. Prinz

I started my professional career when 8bit computers emerge. Especially the venerable Z80 (e.g. Sinclair ZX81 or Spectrum). Lately, I wanted to teach my kids some computer basics and remembered how I discovered how things work on my home computer, years ago.

Unfortunately I no longer have any old 8 bit machines laying around and I also did not want to use any of the many available emulators. I thought it would be better they can touch the machine and could directly see when things change like blinking some LEDs.

Sure nowadays this could also easily be done with one of the many boards like Raspberry PI or Arduinos etc. But their internals (e.g. like an ARM CPU) are not that easy for kids and - I wanted to have some fun too. So I decided to implement a simple Z80 system on an FPGA development board.

Check out f80, a small Z80 system running on an FPGA on https://github.com/rprinz08/f80 - and have some fun.