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Coffee House => Coffee House Boards => CH / Entertainment => Topic started by: weirdami on April 21, 2004, 07:28:01 AM
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On tonight's episode of Futurama on the Cartoon Network, Fry and the Slurm Factory, Prof. Farnsworth shined some "F-rays" onto Bender so he could look inside him. When he shined the rays onto Bender's head, there's a 6502 chip in it. Pretty cool that the 6502 will still be in use in the year 3000. :-)
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That's pretty cool.
I haven't watched that show in a long time. Isn't he a rather old robot?
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Isn't he a rather old robot?
I don't think he's 1000 years old. I'm thinking he's actually quite young, like child years, but I don't really know. You know how cartoons are, constantly adding info in pieces and sometimes it contradicts itself. :-)
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I think the 6502 and Z80 chips will be used for millions of years. :)
Gotta find that episode.
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When the world is finally destroyed by our petty squabbling... the Z80s will inherit the earth.
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:lol:
I've still got some Z80 and Z80-180 evaluation kits somewhere.
The z80-180 is pretty cool. Runs at (gasp) double digit clockspeeds, has multiply and divide instructions (unlike its' predecessor), has an MMU supporting a meg of page mapped memory, on board UARTs etc.
At one point a friend and I were hell bent on an 'upgrade' design for the speccy that would use the z80-180 at 10 MHz and an eeprom containing a reassembled version of the original basic rom with various improvements built in. We wanted a 1Mb speccy, complete with task-switching kernel that supported an 'emulated' 48K mode. Never finished the design though :-(
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Karlos wrote:
:lol:
I've still got some Z80 and Z80-180 evaluation kits somewhere.
The z80-180 is pretty cool. Runs at (gasp) double digit clockspeeds, has multiply and divide instructions (unlike its' predecessor), has an MMU supporting a meg of page mapped memory, on board UARTs etc.
At one point a friend and I were hell bent on an 'upgrade' design for the speccy that would use the z80-180 at 10 MHz and an eeprom containing a reassembled version of the original basic rom with various improvements built in. We wanted a 1Mb speccy, complete with task-switching kernel that supported an 'emulated' 48K mode. Never finished the design though :-(
oh!!!! That's sounds like fun... though I would port AROS to it :-)
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@bloodline
The 48K speccy's rear expansion slot was pretty much total CPU bus access. You could basically get at all the original IO lines and thus supplant completely the original CPU without having to remove it. Or so the theory goes. The design was to make a module that would sit on this bus and use it to access the various logic and video circuitry (such as it was :lol:) and basically do everything else on the module. 1Mb DRAM (we had 256KB to start with) with the first 64K mapped from the eeprom at startup.
The user programming model was very similar - you still only get to see 64Kb at once, but each 4K page can be anywhere in the 1Mb space. Better still the z80-180 was available up to 20+ MHz. Even at 10MHz it was more than 5x faster than the 3.5 MHz z80 in the speccy itself (a combination of higher clockspeed and better instruction timings).
My mate (a proper electronics whizz) was investigating using a cheap&nasty PAL video encoder chip from maplin (TEA2000-v1) on the thing that would have made 6-bit (wow, 64 colours!) colour possible which would have been more than feasable with the amount of RAM available. The chip generated PAL compatible composite output directly, which was handy. We did managed to get a test screen from the evaluation system using it :-D
Of course what we were ending up with was a new computer with a spectrum keyboard and tape interface :lol:
I wonder were all the schematics are now?
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When I have time, I would like to design a Z-80 based system from scratch.
It will probably use a small amount of RAM, and EEPROM... and... what else?
(I think I'll throw in some tri-state latches in there for good measure, too :)
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Not that I'm a massive Futurama fan or anything, but:
Bender's a few years old in the show, there's one episode where he shows them a picture of when he was born/very young, and he's exactly the same and drinking beer as usual!!
In the Episode "Roswell that ends well" they go back in time to 1947 and Fry turns out to be his own grandfather (I'll spare you the details). Anyway, Bender's head falls from the ship and gets lost in the desert until they dig him up again in the future.
So yes he's paradoxically both old and young! His head's over 1000 years old, but his body's a lot younger.
I really need to get out more. :-D