I enjoy working with older machines because they're simple enough (generally) to wrap your head around. The Z80 is an eight bit microprocessor, built by Zilog, from
the late 1970s. The processor itself is of superlative design, reasonably powerful, the later revisions reasonably fast (up to 20mHz) and yet simple enough to be
easily implemented.

The amount of software produced for the Z80 architecture is monumental, although it is, of course, getting harder to find these days. Nevertheless, there is a fair
sized community of enthusiasts who continued to build Z80 systems and develop software for it.

I decided to build my own Z80 system from scratch as a learning experience. I'm not an electrical engineer and I've only really worked with completed systems prior
to this, so I really would be starting from scratch. I decided to share this journey with my YouTube channel followers so that we could all pick something
up at the same time, to encourage others to give this a whirl, and because I couldn't do the channel on regular systems and learn the Z80 at the same time.

We'll be learning:

• Some basic electrical knowledge (where does the resistor go? What does the decoupling cap do?)
• How to wire up the Z80 so it's not just a useless lump of silicon
• Synchronous clock operation
• Connecting RAM and ROM to the Z80
• Adding peripherals
• Delving into the serial protocol, for use with UARTs
• Assembly programming
• And, no doubt, a whole lot more as we stagger through the project

Now would be a great time to go find a copy of the Z80 datasheet - you can download it from Zilog. The datasheet is not only the master
document for how the Z80 operates, but also what lines do what, what you should be doing with them, and an introduction to Z80 assembly. You won't get anywhere useful
without it.