Platform Sinclair ZX80

The Sinclair ZX80 is one of the smallest (in terms of power) platforms supported by the Z88DK. It is suggested to have at least 8K of RAM to get some interesting program working, the minimum memory size allowed is 4K.

Classic library support (+zx80)

• Native console output
• Native console input
• ANSI vt100 engine
• Generic console
  • Redefinable font
  • UDG support
  • Paper colour
  • Ink colour
  • Inverse attribute
  • Bold attribute
  • Underline attribute
• Lores graphics
• Hires graphics (partial support)
• PSG sound
• One bit sound
• Inkey driver
• Hardware joystick
• [ ]] File I/O
• Interrupts
• RS232

Quick start

zcc +zx80 -lm -create-app -Cz--audio program.c

This will create a ''.o'' file and a ''.wav'' file.

ZX80 peculiarities

Character code translation

The ZX80 character set is not ASCII, thus ASCII needs to translated to the ZX80 character set. z88dk allows the mapping to configured at link time:

-pragma-define:ZX_CHAR_XLATE_MODE=0 (default)

• ASCII upper -> Inverse
• ASCII lower -> Upper

-pragma-define:ZX_CHAR_XLATE_MODE=1

• ASCII upper -> Upper
• ASCII lower -> Inverse

-pragma-define:ZX_CHAR_XLATE_MODE=2

• ASCII upper -> Upper
• ASCII lower -> Upper

Display visibility

The ZX80 runs in FAST mode only. This means that the sceen will be normally visible only during the fgetc_cons() calls. The programmer might want to try to keep the display visible also in other moments. An exact timing computation is almost impossible while programming in C, but inserting the gen_tv_field() inside the loops might help: test the results and correct its behaviour experimentally, but be aware that the emulators behave slightly differently than the real hardware and that your progam could not work on both the UK and USA models.

Such trick needs the gen_tv_field_init() to be called on startup.