It’d been buzzing around my head to make something like this a long-term project, so I could build something cool, and also learn more about PLDs and the like, but it seems somebody’s already done that in the form of the Jupiter-II (which has an expansion board that adds lots of nice things). Downside is that his design uses lots of surface-mount parts, which I wouldn’t even have remotely the skill to solder.
Well, this filled in a bunch of random gaps in my understanding!
The Commodore 64 is a computer that refuses to die and decades after its introduction, its community is still going strong. Many computers still work fine, in contrast to generations of computers that came after it, and died too soon, Commodore 64 hardware is often in good shape. But that doesn’t mean that these computers never fail, and repairing them is a common activity in the community. If you work with Commodore 64 hardware, you will know that a broken PLA is one of the most common defects. Especially PLAs that were produced in the years 1983 and 1984.
SkoolKit is a collection of utilities that can be used to disassemble a Spectrum game (or indeed any piece of Spectrum software written in machine code) into a format known as a skool file. Then, from this skool file, you can use SkoolKit to create a browsable disassembly in HTML format, or a re-assemblable disassembly in ASM format. So the skool file is - from start to finish as you develop it by organising and annotating the code - the common ‘source’ for both the reader-friendly HTML version of the disassembly, and the developer- and assembler-friendly ASM version of the disassembly.
I mainly want this for bin2sna.py, as I want to fiddle around with some Z80 development for the Spectrum and Spectrum Next using z80asm, which is a bit barebones by itself.