Meet the ZedRipper – a 16-core, 83 MHz Z80 powerhouse as portable as it is impractical.
If this introductory sentence doesn’t grab your attention because you’re dead inside, maybe this will:
In the course of my historical computing hobbies, I stumbled upon something that I thought was very fascinating – relatively early in its history, CP/M supported a ‘networked’ version called CP/NET. The idea behind it was was one that will still feel pretty familiar to most people – that an office might have one or two ‘real’ machines with large disk drives and printers that it shared with ‘thin-client’ style machines that we’re basically just terminals with CPUs and RAM attached. Each user could basically act as if they had their own private CP/M machine with access to large disks and printers.
This should give you enough hints as to where the creator and developer took this project. Amazing work.
Preppers everywhere take note!
cpcf,
I don’t think that was the author’s intended use case 🙂
I’m rather skeptical an FPGA multicore z80 emulator would be all that useful that. Say there was an armageddon that destroyed all civilization as we know it: you’d have to be very lucky to find any FPGA dev boards in the wild unless you’ve stockpiled them, and then it’s hard to develop on unless you’ve got a working PC with the proprietary software that could be unavailable to you.
While an apocalyptic event could disrupt the supply of computer manufacturing industry, I think that a drop in demand would actually result in an over abundance of old parts for a long time. You could scavenge thousands of PCs in homes and businesses in a short radius. The bigger issue is of course power. Solar would be one solution but most of the solar installations going up are grid tie-in systems that don’t work independently.
Phones would be an obvious choice too given their abundance, but google and apple have engineered them to be much less open than computers, which makes them a bad choice when the world goes awry.
I guess you were probably taking note of the homemade case rather than the electronics? Yeah, that’s one way to do it!. Although the author was using laser cutters and 3d printers. As with the electronics, it’d probably be easy enough to scavenge old cases.
What would you do with computers in a post apocalypse world? Maybe post apocalyptic lan parties to play fallout could be a thing, haha!
I think more useful than anything is the knowledge of how to scrabble together random parts to make a machine. The ability to use technologies and standards that have very few experts left from the day it was created. I can invent some movie plot scenarios where z80’s are king, but I agree its not likely. I can see windows 7 era machines being the choice after the nuclear winter.
You might need some 80s chips that have survived the solar flares.
Also another great project on the same site is his Cray-1A in an FPGA.
I would have prefered a diskrete (non-FPGA) version of this.
Throughhole with wirewrap would have been spectacular 😀
smashIt,
Agreed. Of course an FPGA can emulate it, but it kind of feels like “cheating”. It would be more impressive using authentic 70s & 80s microprocessor tech that could have been built back then if someone wanted to.
I thoroughly enjoyed that article…