News Dev hopes to save legendary Z80 chip with open source clone — resurrects iconic Zilog chip with drop-in Z80 replacement

[Admin]

Zilog is discontinuing the CPU that helped spark home computing in the 80's, but this might not be the end of the chip's story.

Dev hopes to save legendary Z80 chip with open source clone — resurrects iconic Zilog chip with drop-in Z80 replacement : Read more

 

[Findecanor]

Cool! Another method might be to make a circuit board in the same form factor with a modern microcontroller on it that runs a Z80 emulator.
This has been done before to make replacements for the SID and VIC-2 chips for the Commodore 64, among others.

Of course there are people screaming about this method not being "pure".

I wonder if it would be possible to use one of the Z80 chips that are not discontinued, and put that on a circuit board on DIP40 form factor, but someone would have to dive deep into datasheets to figure that out.
Such a chip might not have the exact cycle timings of the original, and therefore break some games.

 

[parkerthon]

Okay, so news to me that there is a market for these chips still and I find that quite interesting. To the folks that care about this classic chip still being produced, can you explain what purpose this serves? Is it for hobbyists to build replica systems? Or is it to perhaps repair/maintain things that have systems/software that use these chips? I guess I’m confused about the point of physically reproducing these chips 40 years later if it’s just sheerly for nostalgia purposes. Is there not an emulation option that works better and is cheaper?