retro-sargon

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...