INMC 80 News

Not all CPUs are all that different to each other (isolated by language), there is some compatibilty in this world. An 8080 CPU and a Z80 for instance, may be likened to someone with a limited and simple vocabulary speaking english to me. I understand the words perfectly, but as the speaker only has command of roughly half the vocabulary I have, it takes longer to get the meaning across. Contrarywise, when a Z80 speaks to an 8080, its vocabulary must be restricted to the ‘intellectual level’ of the 8080. So beware not all object code has the same meaning. With some practice it is possible to determine which is good Z80 code from code for some other processor or from rubbish.

Having said that this business is not ‘book learning’ stuff, I must follow on by saying that the Z80 Technical Manual is vitally important. Read and digested in little doses, it becomes quite understandable. If you read the Technical manual from end to end, once, and understand it a11, then sell your Nascom and go and buy an IBM 370 instead, you obviously need something meatier to chew on.

The Technical Manual goes on about the registers and describes in great detail how they are interconnected. Think of the registers as railway sidings, some connected to the two main lines, others connected to one or other of the main lines. The Technical manual gives you a nice map to the whole ‘goods yard’. On one main line there are eight main lines running parallel and on the other there are 16 main lines. Each siding has eight parallel tracks connected by points to the 8 wide main line, whilst pairs of registers may also be connected to the 16 wide main line. Trains in the form of eight wagons each, one on each parallel line, move along the tracks of the 8 wide main line parallel to each other, and may be directed through points from the main line into the sidings. Likewise, groups of wagons, 16 wide move along the 16 wide main line, and may be moved to a selected 16 wide siding, composed of a pair of 8 wide sidings. That’s all the load (LD) group of instructions do. If we want to load the ‘A’ register, eight parallel bits are placed on the (8 wide) data bus, and are directed through switches into the ‘A’ register. Similarly, sixteen bits of data may be moved along the (16 wide) address bus to or from either the register pairs, or special purpose registers such as the Program Counter. There is one important thing to know about the load group of instructions though; when an instruction such as LD A,B (that means load the ‘A’ register with the contents of the ‘B’ register) is encountered, unlike trains, the contents of ‘B’ is COPIED to ‘A’, not moved to ‘A’, so the contents of ‘B’ remains unchanged.

There are quite a number of registers in the Z80, we’ll start with just a few of them. Perhaps the two most important are the ‘PC’ (Program Counter) register and the ‘A’ register. Starting with the ‘A’ register, this is also refered to as the ‘accumulator’, for reasons I hope will become obvious in a few moments. It is here that it is all done, all arithmetic and logical operations are performed in the accumulator. For instance, if we wanted to add two numbers together, we would put one in ‘A’ and one in another register, say, ‘B’. When the addition is performed, the answer will be in ‘A’ (’B’ incidentally will be unchanged), hence ‘A’ accumulates the answer.

The ‘PC’ register is a special purpose 16 bit register, and its job is to keep an eye on the address where the processor is to get its next byte from. In many senses, the ‘PC’ register is purely automatic, every time the processor fetches a byte (as it must do to know what to do next), the ‘PC’ register is automatically incremented (increment means to add 01H to it) to the next byte. When the processor is ready for the next byte, the contents of the ‘PC’ register are placed on the address bus, and this forms the address of the next byte to be fetched.