John Hardy’s engineering notebook
Current bench Atom · Z80 systems · AI and authorship
Recovering Ken Stone’s VIC-20 adventure from a cassette recording involved decoding pulse timings, BASIC and PETSCII. The investigation also helped me reconstruct memories of our early work on Caverns and the games Ken sold through Micro Parts.
Triptych is a retro computer project using three ESP32 boards for CPU and storage, VGA video, and sound. The goal is a machine you can program directly, with a Z80 and CP/M at the centre of the current design.
Atom runs on macOS, Windows, Linux … and CP/M. The assembler itself is written in Z80 assembly, fits within 16 KiB and can assemble its own source.
My work with the Z80 began on paper in the late 1970s and became real hardware in the early 1980s. This series documents a return to that architecture through the construction of a modern debugging environment.