retro-sargon

I thought my Z80 project (https://github.com/billforsternz/retro-sargon) was close to the whimsical end of the practical to just for fun spectrum but this takes things to a whole new level, kudos.

Yes, pretty close so full translation is easy if you have the source code. If not, emulation is the normal way. My emulator was faster than native 8080 code on everything but vanilla 8088 PCs, so it's more than sufficient. I address translation in depth in my Retro Sargon project, an exercise in getting a vintage Z80 (8080 superset) assembly language program working on modern PCs. https://github.com/billforsternz/retro-sargon See the "Yet More Details" section in the README.

The process of converting a completely winning position (typically one with a large material advantage) is a phase change relative to normal play which is the struggle to achieve such a position. In other words you are doing something different at that point. For example, me as weak FIDE CM (Candidate Master) could not compete with a top grandmaster in a game of chess, but I could finish off a trivial win. Edit: Recently I brought some ancient (1978) chess software back to life https://github.com/billforsternz/retro-sargon. These two phases of chess, basically two different games, were quite noticeable with that program, which is chess software stripped back to the bone. Sargon 1978 could play decently well, but it absolutely did not have the technique to convert winning positions (because this is different challenge to regular chess). Fo

I'm featured on that page, for porting it to C for running on modern PCs. But by far my favourite retro chess software project is Sargon 1978 https://github.com/billforsternz/retro-sargon

I browsed through the repository as discovered by colejohnson66 downthread https://github.com/ajxs/yamaha_dx7_rom_disassembly. This is an example of superb, meticulous, lovingly documented work. The kind of thing you don't see every day, congratulations. The attention to detail is really just chef's kiss, starting with a really good repository name (a small thing, but still), continuing through clear and apparently comprehensive documentation of what you did and why, then on to beautifully formatted and commented assembly language (much better than the original source code I'd wager) with coherent and consistent paragraph commenting a particular delight, and finally (and very importantly) dedication to making sure others can reproduce your results and generate a matching binary too. There are likely to be other things of beauty in there I

I understand this opinion, but don't agree with it at all. There were two killer features of the 8086: First was that you could translate your 8080 and Z-80 CP/M programs to it without too much work. So for example, the IBM PC immediately had WordStar, Visicalc and DBase. I found an interesting example of the process here: https://github.com/billforsternz/retro-sargon#yet-more-detai... (But this actually converts Z-80 to 32-bit x86.) Second killer feature is the hated segment registers. Yes, they are annoying, but they provide a rudimentary form of built-in memory management. So for example, you can run UNIX on x86, but you can not on 68000 which has no memory management. [Well you could with extra hardware: Trs-80 model 16 could run Xenix, but had an external memory manager. Also, you could use PC-relative code, but with a performan

I tried to track down that converter for a retro computing project about 10 years ago and failed; https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2038929/where-can-i-find... A few months ago I returned to the project and completed it this time; https://github.com/billforsternz/retro-sargon As I should have realised the first time, you can write your own converter in an afternoon or two :-)

I see a lot of Z80 enthusiasm on the web, is there a good forum/website to talk to the hard core? I just finished porting the classic Sargon Z80 chess program to run on x86, https://github.com/billforsternz/retro-sargon . One of the side effects of the project is Sargon in real Z80 assembly language, rather than the weird 8080 hybrid it was originally coded and published in, and I am sure there will be a hard core Z80 fan or two who would appreciate that.

I know I am a barbarian, but I'll probably just continue to use my own std::string sprintf( const char *fmt, ... ); function as implemented here; https://github.com/billforsternz/retro-sargon/blob/master/sr...