AVR Freaks

Using the Arduino framework, I can port my cpm emulation between different architectures and chips with little effort. Arduino abstracts the Serial interface and hopefully the SD card as well, so assuming you have enough ram, the actual architecture and the chip become near irrelevant.

My recent adventures have included a MaixBit (RISC-V64 dual core @ 400MHz with 8MB of ram) and Teensy4.0(Cortex M7 @600MHz 1MB ram). My cpm emulation runs freekin fast on the Teensy assuming I put the code in ram vs flash. If the code executes from flash, it is about 20 times slower. The teensy is around twice the speed on the MaixBit. I also tried mapping the Z80 ram out to a serial 8MB dram chip(IPS6404) on the Teensy. Using a 80MHz spi clock the performance was around 20 times slower than using the on chip high speed ram. I tried some simple caching and found that 8 bytes of cache was around optimal, 16 and 32bytes was slower.

My benchmark for performance was a simple

10 for t = 1 to 10000

20 next t

in mbasic

The fastest was sub 1 second, slowest was 20 seconds or so.

Here's another z80/8080 emulation:

https://thehighnibble.com/imsai8...

He uses an esp32. The web stuff is impressive.

Something like a SAMD51 if you want something from the Atmel/microchip stable. 120MHz Cortex M4 up to 256k ram and has Arduino support.

The teensy4.0 is hard to beat on price/performance though  - $20usd. Need to solder on a sdcard socket though.

You'd want to ask Avocet Systems that question.

You can easily run your existing application in a virtual machine.

If you want something more modern you could contact IAR - but sit down when you see the price!

Yes of course, but the compilation time is strong increases.

That doesn't make sense. A modern machine running a VM will be many times faster than a 16bit machine ever would be.

IAR will happily sell you a Z80 assembler and c compiler.

Virtualbox will happily emulate a machine running msdos faster than a 486 class machine. And you’re complaining about the speed of running an assembler? The speed of the disk alone is many times faster. So i really don’t understand your issue with runtime. Besides, we’re talking about a Z80, so the source files are hardly the size of Linux!
I think you’ll need some hard evidence to convince me otherwise.

Why are you talking about Compilation? You said you only do assembler. Your project doesn’t sound particularly large. Come back and tell me how long it takes to ‘compile’ running msdos under virtualbox on a modern machine. Otherwise its all fluff.

Assembler.

I need all the .EXE (x16) files to be in the same section declared in path.
The result of the application (.HEX,.LST etc...) should be in the same disk and same section as the source files (.ASM).
I am run a .BAT file using Norton Commander from different drives and folders.
vDOS can provide this?

Alan, At work we used the SAM3 and sam4 series, there are in that series processors with more than enough SRAM.

Today I play with a SAMG55 that is a cortex M4 chip with 512K flash and 178K SRAM, I only use AS7 for personal code development so these processors for sure are supported by AS7.

Mchip has been bringing out newer processors in the mean time, but cannot imagine that they would not be supported by AS7.

You could have a look at the website, and then when you found one see if you can start a project with it in AS7.