A PIC32 running at 80MHz can, as you will see, emulate in real time not just the Z80 processor of the times, but the ULA (ASIC) chip that was assisting the CPU with video output, sound, keyboard and tape interfaces. More seriously, it is interesting to see how far microcontroller technology has gone in these 20 years.

This is were I had my first encounter with BASIC, Z80 assembly and later Pascal. The engineer’s answer is: for the challenge of it!Īfter all, this is the platform I learned programming on (and I played a good number of videogames too). The pragmatic answer is: to play thousands of games still available for download today! Why would you ever want to emulate such an old computer? Now if you ask me what a cassette tape is… well, forget it! If you have never heard of the ZX Spectrum, it probably means you are too young as this was in the mid-eighties (yes, more than 20 years ago) one of the first personal computers or, better I should say, “ home” computers, sold at a fraction of the cost of the IBM XT PC (introduced almost exactly in the same year).Īt the time it spurred a very strong community of developers and thousands of educational and gaming applications were developed for it and distributed in cassette tapes. These four components are then customized to provide emulation of the specific hardware features of the (Timex/Sinclair) ZX Spectrum personal computer. In fact it does combine in a single application the following components: This is perhaps one of the most complex projects I have ported to the MikroElektronika Multimedia platform (MMB-MX4) so far.

Sinclair zx spectrum emulator