Now again a Sharp Pocket Computer - but the (almost) Z80 compatible one...
Friday, December 18, 2009, 09:00 PM
Posted by Administrator
I got a Sharp PC-1500 last week and I liked it, especially the possibility to use Z80 machine code (exception: status register usage is different). That's very easy, because even if you just have the basic device without anything else, you can use the BASIC commands PEEK, POKE and CALL (you should have an Assembler on a PC but you can dump the binary code so you can "POKE" all bytes into memory).
Also, it's easy to transfer program binaries to the device with the help of a PC... you can play previous recorded WAV files with a sound card, and connect the cassette interface to the PC's audio output. But it's also possible to convert the files to real binaries (e.g. for disassembling).
At the moment I am looking for the interface, PC-1500 accessories are much easier to obtain compared to the previously introduced PC-1211, so it should not take too long to get it.
It's a bit bulky, but this doesn't matter ( it's still smaller then a modern Netbook ;-) ).
A specialized web site is
http://www.pc1500.com/ ... a lot of software downloads are there.
The mentioned program for the PC is located at
http://pocket.free.fr/html/soft/soft_e.htmlInteresting interface to connect a Commodore 1541 to a Sharp PC-1500:
http://www.tramsoft.ch/sharp_erweiterun ... loppy_1500More technical details (in german):
http://www.duensser.com/pc_pc1500spec.htm---
The later PC-1600 was 100% Z80 compatible due to the additional build in SC7852 (=Z80) CPU.