E220Term

Version: 1.0.20092.1
Created by: Jali jali@orca-central.de
Last modified by: Jali jali@orca-central.de

About

The PC-E220 was one of the last, and by far the most powerful of the Sharp Pocket-Computer series.

These where small computers, you could actually carry around with you, and use on the go. While most of them where glorified programmable pocket calculators, the PC-E220 came with 32KiB of RAM and a CMOS-SC7852 CPU, that was code compatible with the Zilog Z80A at 3.58 MHz. That made the CPU faster than an Amstrad CPC or other Z80 based machines of the time.

While the 144x32 dot-matrix display is not very well equipped for graphics, because it is divided into 5x7 cells, it can print a wide range of characters, and displays 24 characters in 4 rows. By the standards of a pocket computer, that was a lot.

It comes, however, with a fully equipped serial interface, that can be used to connect to other systems.

This project attempts to implement a small dumb terminal, to connect to a console of a Linux system, just for the experience of writing some useful code for his tiny machine.

Coding

The E220 has a built-in assembler, which is the target of this code. The goal is, to write code, that can be transferred onto the E220 and assembled directly on the device. Of course any Z80 assembler should be able to assemble the code. Keep in mind though, that the code makes use of the built in ROM function, for example for outputting characters on the screen, and therefore will only work on the E220!

The src/examples section contains experimental code to use these sub routines.