Development Hardware
You'll need a serial terminal to talk to the system. This is connected to the SIO chip, port A. Unless you happen to have a real VT100 like terminal you'll want to connect via terminal emulator hosted on a PC. Given these no longer have serial ports you'll want a serial to USB converter. There are many of these around however some do and some don't support the RTS/CTS flow control signals. You will want to get one that supports flow control. This is the one that I bought from Amazon and haven't had any problems. If you don't have flow control then downloading hex files via the serial port is going to be hard work!
Make sure you also use terminal emulation software that allows you to enable hardware flow control. This was something of a problem however I found picocom which works perfectly on my Mac and I believe works on other platforms. The command I use to start Picocom on the command line for my Mac is:
picocom --baud 230400 --flow h --databits 8 /dev/tty.usbserial-AQ00K80L
The name of your device will be different! the --flow is key here to switching on flow control.
When connecting don't forget that CTS/RTS need to be crossed: the RTS output from the card connects to CTS input on the adaptor and vice-versa.
I connect a Raspberry Pi to the SIO port B and the ZIOS/ZLoader software supports a fast download process from the Pi making software development on a host computer particularly straightforward. More details will follow.
Two SDCards are supported. While you can use the system with no SDCard it's recommended that you install at least card 1. You'll need an adaptor. This is the card I've used from Mouser.
The reader's no use without a card. The current software is only compatible with the original SDCard format that used byte addressing so for now you're limited to cards of 2GB or under. These are the 2GB ones I used from Amazon.