zx spectrum

40-years-later,-kontrabant-2-for-zx-spectrum-is-rebroadcast-on-fm-in-slovenia

40 years later, Kontrabant 2 for ZX Spectrum is rebroadcast on FM in Slovenia

adventure games, cassette, cassette tapes, gaming, Text Adventures, text games, vintage computers, zx spectrum / /

Cassettes are back, baby —

Celebrating radio waves, magnetic tape heads, and smuggled 8-bit computers.

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Kontrabant 2 title image on ZX Spectrum

Enlarge / In 1984, the year 2000 was so promising, students made entire games promising to take you there.

Radio Student

Software is almost impossibly easy to download, distribute, and access compared to 40 years ago. Everything is bigger, faster, and more flexible, but there’s a certain charm to the ways of diskettes and cassettes that is hard to recapture. That doesn’t mean we can’t try.

By the time you read this, it’s likely that Kontrabant 2 will have already hit the airwaves on Radio Študent in Slovenia. At 9: 30 pm Slovenia time (UTC+2 in Daylight Savings Time), if you are tuned to 89.3 FM, hitting record on a cassette tape will capture a buzzing sound that will run until just over 50KB have been transmitted. If all went well, you can load the tape into your working ZX Spectrum or bring it to the Computer History Museum in Slovenia and use theirs to try it out.

<em>Kontrabant 2</em> box art.” height=”388″ src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/kontrabant3.jpg” width=”324″></img><figcaption> <p><em>Kontrabant 2</em> box art.</p> <p>Radio Student</p> </figcaption></figure> <p>It’s the 40th anniversary of <em>Kontrabant 2</em>, which was originally published by Radio Študent, both in physical copies and in similar over-the-air fashion. The game is in Serbian, as it was originally made for what was then Yugoslavia, for ZX Spectrums mostly smuggled in from Western Europe. Smuggling was something that lots of Yugoslavs did, in somewhat casual fashion, and it inspired <em>Kontrabant</em> and its sequel, text adventure games with some graphics.</p> <p>That I understand any of this is thanks to Vlado Vince, a Croatian/Yugoslavia native who wrote about Yugoslavian adventure games for a Spanish magazine, Club de Aventuras AD, and <a href=reposted it on his personal site. Kontrabant, which is text-only, has the player travel about the country (“and beyond!”) to collect all the parts of a ZX Spectrum. You meet famous smugglers from Slovene history, get a picture of yourself so you can leave the country for certain parts, and at one point obtain an Austrian porn magazine, which, in typical adventure game style, is later traded for something else.

A Kontrabant 2.” height=”720″ src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/kontrabant1.png” width=”960″>

A “Yugosaurus” in Kontrabant 2.

Radio Student/Vlado Vince

Kontrabant 2, from 1984, added the kinds of garish colors and flashing graphics that ZX Spectrum enthusiasts can recognize from a hundred yards away. This time you’re trying “to make your way to the year 2000 and to the amazing computers of the future,” Vince writes, and the game layers in political and social subtext and critiques throughout the journey. Also, the original Radio Študent cassette tape version had punk rock songs by “the Kontra Band” on it, which is neat as heck.

Kontrabant and its sequel were written by Žiga Turk and Matevž Kmet, students at the time, who are talking about the games and the times at the Computer History Museum Slovenia today. If you have a chance to visit that place, I think you should do so, given the impressive number of working vintage computers listed. Turk would go on to found Moj mikro magazine, a monthly computer magazine running from 1984 to 2015. He started the Virtual Shareware Library, which later became shareware.com (now a Digital Trends site I don’t quite recognize), and WODA, the Web Oriented Database. He’s now a professor of construction informatics in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

You can play Kontrabant 2 on the Internet Archive’s emulator if you can read or translate Serbian and understand the text prompts. YouTube lacks a playthrough of the game with graphics, though a later port to a native platform, the Iskra Delta Partner, is available in Apple-II-ish green-on-black.

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after-48-years,-zilog-is-killing-the-classic-standalone-z80-microprocessor-chip

After 48 years, Zilog is killing the classic standalone Z80 microprocessor chip

CP/M, microprocessors, microsoft, nintendo game boy, retrotech, Tech, TI-81, ti-83, Z80, Zilog, zx spectrum / /

rest in silicon —

Z80 powered game consoles, ZX Spectrum, Pac-Man, and a 1970s PC standard based on CP/M.

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A cropped portion of a ca. 1980 ad for the Microsoft Z80 SoftCard, which allowed Apple II users to run the CP/M operating system.

Enlarge / A cropped portion of a ca. 1980 ad for the Microsoft Z80 SoftCard, which allowed Apple II users to run the CP/M operating system.

Microsoft

Last week, chip manufacturer Zilog announced that after 48 years on the market, its line of standalone DIP (dual inline package) Z80 CPUs is coming to an end, ceasing sales on June 14, 2024. The 8-bit Z80 architecture debuted in 1976 and powered a small-business-PC revolution in conjunction with CP/M, also serving as the heart of the Nintendo Game Boy, Sinclair ZX Spectrum, the Radio Shack TRS-80, the Pac-Man arcade game, and the TI-83 graphing calculator in various forms.

In a letter to customers dated April 15, 2024, Zilog wrote, “Please be advised that our Wafer Foundry Manufacturer will be discontinuing support for the Z80 product and other product lines. Refer to the attached list of the Z84C00 Z80 products affected.”

Designers typically use the Z84C00 chips because of familiarity with the Z80 architecture or to allow legacy system upgrades without needing significant system redesigns. And while many other embedded chip architectures have superseded these Z80 chips in speed, processing power, and capability, they remained go-to solutions for decades in products that didn’t need any extra horsepower.

Zilog will continue to manufacture the eZ80 microcontroller family, which was introduced in 2001 as a faster version of the Z80 series and comes in different physical package configurations (pin layouts).

Powering a microcomputer revolution

The 8-bit Z80 microprocessor was designed in 1974 by Federico Faggin as a binary-compatible, improved version of the Intel 8080 with a higher clock speed, a built-in DRAM refresh controller, and an extended instruction set. It was extensively used in desktop computers of the late 1970s and early 1980s, arcade video game machines, and embedded systems, and it became a cornerstone of several gaming consoles, like the Sega Master System.

The Tandy Radio Shack TRS-80 (1977), which used the Zilog Z80.

Enlarge / The Tandy Radio Shack TRS-80 (1977), which used the Zilog Z80.

SSPL/Getty Images

During the mid-late 1970s, the Z80 became a popular CPU for S-100 bus machines, which were early personal computers with a 100-pin modular bus system that allowed swapping cards to build systems based on parts from various manufacturers. Digital Research targeted the Z80 as a key platform for its CP/M operating system, and the association between Z80 and CP/M stuck, powering dozens of small business computers until the mid-1980s, when IBM PC clones running Microsoft’s MS-DOS became the new industry standard.

Interestingly, Microsoft’s first hardware product, the Z80 SoftCard for the Apple II in 1980, added the famous Zilog CPU to the classic personal computer and allowed users to run CP/M on that machine. In 1982, Bill Gates claimed that SoftCard installations represented the largest single user base of CP/M machines.

Last call in June 2024

Zilog is notably discontinuing several Z84C00 chips that are still available in classic 40-pin DIP packages resembling the classic Z80 CPU chips of the 1970s. (These standalone chips include a CPU and nothing else, unlike a microcontroller, which can include RAM and other accessory devices.) The DIP design features two rows of 20 pins with a plastic package in between that contains the actual embedded silicon chip, resembling the classic Z80 CPU chips of the 1970s.

After June 14, Zilog will stop taking orders, manufacture whatever orders are available if they are sufficient in quantity, then ship the last runs of the chips to resellers like Mouser Electronics and Digikey.

A classic dual inline package (DIP) version of the Z80 from the 1970s. It features two rows of 20 pins in a ceramic package.

Enlarge / A classic dual inline package (DIP) version of the Z80 from the 1970s. It features two rows of 20 pins in a ceramic package.

The discontinuation list provided by Zilog in its letter includes 13 products from the Z84C00 series, which are chips in the Z80 family that run at clock speeds from 6 to 20 MHz and maintain compatibility with the original Z80 architecture. Here’s the full list of part numbers that will be discontinued:

  • Z84C0006VEG
  • Z84C0006PEG
  • Z84C0010PEG
  • Z84C0008AEG
  • Z84C0020VEG
  • Z84C0008PEG
  • Z84C0010AEG
  • Z84C0008VEG
  • Z84C0010VEG
  • Z84C0010VEG00TR
  • Z84C0020AEG
  • Z84C0020PEG
  • Z84C0006AEG

So while the Z80 architecture will stick around in eZ80 form, it appears that this is the last call for newly manufactured standalone 8-bit Z80 CPU chips in the classic DIP form factor. We reached out to Zilog for clarification about its plans for the future of the Z80 platform but did not receive a response by press time.

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