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Using the Etched Pixels Emulator Kit

Back

The Etched Pixels Emulator kit supports the "Z80-Retro!" along with many other homebrew projects.

Clone and Build

Clone the Etched Pixels Emulator Kit github repository here from here: https://github.com/EtchedPixels/EmulatorKit

$ cd EmulatorKit
$ make
< compilation takes a while>
$ cp 2063 ../2063-Z80-cpm

Compilation takes a while as it compiles all the emulators for the different supported projects.

Now that you have the emulator binary you should be ready to go.

Preparing the firmware and the sdcard image

You will need to prepare the firmware image and the SD Card image for use with the emulator. As we don't have a real formatted SD Card to work with we need to create an SDcard.img file that will have the correctly formatted partitions on it.

Build the 2063-Z80-cpm Project

First do a build of the whole project from the root directory of the 2063-z80-cpm project.

$ cd 2063-Z80-cpm
$ make clean
$ make

This will create the following binaries needed for the next steps:

  • 2063-Z80-cpm/boot/firmware.bin
  • 2063-Z80-cpm/filesystem/drive.img

Create the ROM Image

The emulator expects the firmware image to be exactly 16KB in size. Use the truncate command in Linux to do that.

$ cd 2063-Z80-cpm/boot
$ truncate -s 16K firmware.bin
$ hexdump -C firmware.bin| tail -n 3
000009b0  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
*
00004000

Validate that the last line is 00004000 (0x4000 in hex) or 16K.

Create the SD Card Image

!!! WARNING !!!

This process can damage your host file system if you get it wrong. Make sure you only format the loop device after setting it up.

This step is a bit more complicated and these steps are definitely ONLY going to work on a Linux host.

$ cd 2063-Z80-cpm/filesystem

$ dd if=/dev/zero of=SDcard.img bs=1024 count=512000

$ sudo losetup -Pf SDcard.img

At this point you want to verify the loopback device that was created by the losetup command. You will need it in the next step.

$ sudo losetup --all | grep SDcard
/dev/loop12: [2050]:7215475 (/home/davelatham/dev/retro/2063-Z80-cpm/filesystem/SDcard.img)

In my case here, the loopback device is /dev/loop12 so that's what I will use. You must use the device name your system reports.

$ (
echo n  # Add a new partition
echo p  # Primary partition
echo 1  # Partition number
echo    # First sector (Accept default)
echo +128M # Last sector (Accept default: varies)
echo n  # Add a new partition
echo p  # Primary partition
echo 2  # Partition number
echo    # First sector (Accept default)
echo    # Last sector (Accept default: varies)
echo t  # Partition Type
echo 1  # First partition
echo db # Tpye = CP/M
echo t  # Partition Type
echo 2  # Second partition
echo 06 # Fat 16
echo w  # Write changes
) | sudo fdisk /dev/loop12

Whew! Now that you have an image file with partitions on it, you can copy the drive.img CP/M file system on to it.

You should still be in the 2063-Z80-cpm/filesystem directory.

$ sudo mkfs.msdos /dev/loop12p1
$ sudo mkfs.msdos /dev/loop12p2
$ sudo dd if=drive.img of=/dev/loop12p1 bs=512

Finally unmount the loopback disk.

$ sudo losetup -d /dev/loop12

You should now have a 500MB SDcard.img file.

Running the Emulator

To distinguish this "Z80-Retro!" project from a different Z80-Retro project, the author has named the emulator 2063 after the board number.

$ cd 2063-Z80-cpm
$ ./2063 -r boot/firmware.bin -S filesystem/SDcard.img

Z80 Retro Board 2063.3
      git: v20230317.1-0-g8bcf644 2023-03-17 22:20:02 -0500
    build: 2023-04-23 18:03:16+12:00

Booting SD card partition 1

Partition Table:
C1BE: 00 20 21 00 7F 71 21 10 00 08 00 00 00 00 04 00
C1CE: 00 71 22 10 06 BC 3D 3F 00 08 04 00 00 98 0B 00
C1DE: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
C1EE: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

Partition 1 starting block number: 00000800
Partition 1 number of blocks:      00040000

Loading 0x20 512-byte blocks into 0xC000 - 0xFFFF
................................

Z80 Retro BIOS Copyright (C) 2021 John Winans
CP/M 2.2 Copyright (C) 1979 Digital Research
  git: v20230317.1-0-g8bcf644 2023-03-17 22:20:02 -0500
build: 2023-04-22 17:56:49+12:00

NOTICE: rw_dmcache library installed.

a>

Exit the emulator by typing CTRL+\