Description
The RP2350 RomWBW Bus is an RP2350 emulated Z80 CPM Computer. It is capable of running the ROM images created by RomWBW) which gives you a number of monitors, CPM alternatives, PASCAL, FORTH, BASIC.
From within CP/M, the kit will allow you to run a number of 1980’s Z80 text based games and features a ports of Microsoft BASIC (MBASIC), BBC Basic, Pascal, FORTH a handful of text adventure and other text games and will also run any CP/M-80 2 or 3 compatible software.
The kit will allow you to connect to the Pico RomWBW Machine either by USB serial, or an FDTI compatible serial cable with a suitable serial emulator like TeraTerm, or minicom.
The kit comes with a PCB, SD card holder, buttons, switches, resistors and a number of case and front panel options. The kit comes pre programmed and includes a 500Mb SD Card that contains the ROMWBW Rom, and a couple of RomWBW disk images, so you can dive into 80’s retro computing with no programming or setup. The Emulation software and RomWBW is open source and is available from Github for easy updates, either by updating the SD card contents, or/and directly reprogramming the onboard RP2350.
Up to two disk images can be accessed from the SD card, encompassing many sub-disk drives (letters) and the RomWBW Rom and Ram disks are also supported.
The RP2350 also includes a RC2014 bus compatible 40 way interface that will talk to many externally connected RC2014 bus I/O modules. (Note this is I/O only, It will not work with memory or processor modules).
I/O Port 0 is brought out to the front panel LEDs and switches, which are used when booting to allow selection of which OS or disk to load. Details are in the RomWBW user guide.
The LEDs provide an indication of the loading process again Details are in the RomWBW user guide.
- The front panel also has three buttons “Dump”, “Aux”, Z80Reset and Reset.
- The Dump button dumps the content of the current 64K RAM bank directly to the flash drive.
- Z80Reset resets the emulated Z80 without affecting the contents of the ROM and RAM banks.
- The Reset Button resets the RP2350.
- The Aux button, Is to enable Fast File serial connectivity to a host computer (works, but still under development)
The Front panel also contains a emulated 4 line x 16 “LCD” Character display on an OLED module. Compatible with a subset of the HD44780’s commands.
The Emulated Peripheral ports can be changed or disabled by an “ini” file on the SD card to match any existing Z80 RomWBW setup.
There is also a built in SPO256AL2 emulation for 80’s style speech synthesis and a small speaker is included.
The software for emulated Z80 CPM is still evolving and there are other features that can be found by looking at the RP2350 RomWBW Bus Github pages.
The SD images are compatible with the RC2014 Micro SD Card Module ( https://extkits.co.uk/product/rc2014-micro-sd-card-module/ ) when the RC2014 is running RomWBW
