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My first Z-80 board comes to life!



Hi everyone!
Today I wanted to take a break from coding and decided to take the soldering iron in hand to relax a bit. The objective: get my N8VEM Z80 cpu card up and running.
I had already soldered most of the passive components a week ago: all that was left to do (or so I thought) was to solder a few headers, plug the components and start with a simple print loop monitor to test the card.

Everything went well until the end, when I noticed one of the 74LS165 had a disconnected pin: turned out the machined socket was bad and one pin was not making contact. I had to desolder the socket, and sadly I damaged not one, but two vias in the process (first ones since years... I guess hurry of completing the board fired back)! The damage wasn't serious enough to interrupt the traces, but to play safe I rewired the connections on the back.
Anyway, now the board correctly starts the monitor, can switch back and forth between low and high pages and can read/write the full 1Mb from the EPROM/RAM card i have installed.

I'll leave work on the board on hold until I get the 6502 V2, because right now I'm having fun with IDE code for that processor and my 6502 v1 cannot live on the bus with another processor card (btw, now I can read and write any sector on my CF cards! I'll publish the code this weekend).

Attaching a few pictures of the card working and of the repair on the back.

Bye!
Fabio

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