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Although it is possible to use the BBC BASIC as a development environment for Z88 applications, the limited memory capacity of BASIC make this task somewhat arduous. Moreover during development the Z88 is likely to crash fairly often, so much time would be spent in backing up source files to EPROM or another computer. The Z88 however, is not easy to break down. We've managed to work for several months on software (using both a native Z80 assembler and a cross assembler) with plenty of soft resets and without loss of files. It depends on the type of crash. Software could be developed on the original computer - with a brave spirit and plenty of time! However, these things have become much easier on modern desktop computers - cross-platform developing and testing, and final upload and validation on the real Z88.
For application writing and publishing on EPROM and FLASH cards, it is needed to have a unique application card id, if you are going to produce EPROM card application software for application cards. When Cambridge Computer still were manufactoring manufacturing the Z88, they administrated the card id's. Since they moved their office to Scotland (and have stopped production and interest of Z88), the When the company folded, card id registrations were lost. Many years since , we had to find another waya new method has been developed; the Z88 development team has now implemented a card builder tool which generates unique ID's using CRC32 CRC-32 checksum on the binary application code. Chances of card ID conflicts are small and guarantees safe installation of application cards on the Z88. Applications can also be developed to be targeted for installation in RAM, which requires no special card ID's.The Z88 development project at http://cambridgez88.jira.com have made a substantial effort to produce a
Z88 Assembler Workbench
Targeted for modern desktop systems, the Z88 development project provides a fully featured Z80 macro assembler tool-chain containing a Z80 CPU cross assembler / linker / library manager, application card builder tool , linker and library manager and Z88 computer emulator, commonly labelled as the Z88 Assembler Workbench. This toolchain is used to compile large assembler application projects such as the OZ operating system (more than 130. The Z88 Assembler Workbench is 000 lines of assember source code!). The tools are available for Windows, Linux, Mac OSX and other Unix operating systems. Further, a
The Z88 computer emulator and debugging environment is available that - OZvm - supports tracing, breakpoints and many other features to run and analyse your applications both on simulated EPROM, Flash or RAM. Finally
RomUpdate, an application EPROM & FLASH card programming utility, has been implemented on the Z88 to produce your own application cards natively.
The project also provides a file transfer utility, EazyLink2, in order to be able to test the code on real Z88 computers.
All tools are available for download here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/z88/files/Z88%20Assembler%20Workbench/
Source code for all Z88 Assembler workbench tools are available here:
If you have ideas, bug reports, suggestions for new applications or features of the Z88 operating system, or have an itch to develop software, dont't hesitate to join us.
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you can contact the project on https://cambridgez88.jira.com/wiki.
mpm
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z88card
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romupdate
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OZvm - a Z88 computer emulator and debugger tool
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Abundance of existing source code of Z88 applications
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