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Hi All,<p>I am looking for suggestions for a 8085 IDE toolkit. I would rather get a commercial package that has CDs and paper documentation. It is not that I am opposed to shareware or open source, but I have had very little luck installing downloaded compilers and such. I also want the CD incase my HD crashes. <p>Thank You in advance!<p>Joe

Do you mean the Intel 8085 processor??? I hope not. Why do you think there would be an IDE available? For that matter, what are you doing that an 8085 would be an appropriate solution?

Hi Joe,
If you are into the 8085, the road is not very far to Z80. I can recommend the eZ80 Acclaim development kit. I think you'll get all your light and whistles there.<p> http://www.zilog.com/products/partdetai ... F920200ZCO <p>Good luck <p>TOK

Engineer 1138;<p>Yes I do mean the Intel 8085....for what I need it is very well suited. A rad hard version was used on one of the mars rovers, and that is the sort of thing that I need...a robotics project. There are several companies that sell IDE software for the Intel 8085, and I am leaning in the direction of Dunfield. There is also a Euro company that sells them, but only as a download...<p>J

I wonder if an SDK-85 might do for you.<p>http://www.old-computers.com/museum/com ... st=1&c=805<p>You had to program it in hex, and the memory was volatile, so you had to keep it powered up to remember anything, but it sure was handy to learn with. I had always wanted to stick a serial port on it to load it from a PC, but I never quite got around to that.<p>I'm sure they're available on auction sites, but I did give one to one of my sons for a special project he had in mind. I don't know whether he'd want to part with it or not, now, years later.<p>I had a bunch of 8085 chips around, too, but I don't remember whether I gave them to him or threw them out, or still have them buried somewhere.<p>You're aware NASA is looking for 8085s in bulk? There was even some talk of conning Intel into doing another production run for them.<p>[ May 27, 2005: Message edited by: terri ]</p>

OK, what kind of robot are you building that radiation hardness is a requirement? If it's not going into space (or other weight requirement) couldn't you just use a new microcontroller with a lead shield?<p>IIRC, the Sojourner rover used a PowerPC with shielding. More modern processor, with much better tools available.

I spent YEARS working with the 8080, 8085 and Z80 and I like the 8085 the best. Easy interface, clean timing, simple instruction set (I never have used many of the Z80 extras) - just a sweet device.<p>Now, I don't know about IDEs. I have always used a simple monitor program in EPROM while bringing up new systems but most recently have been using NoIce for a Z80 project. Very nice package.<p>Just for fun, I took the T80 FPGA emulation of the Z80 (http://www.opencores.org/projects.cgi/web/t80/overview) and added a couple of CF devices and got CP/M 2.2 running. While not as fast as the latest Z80s, it is respectable at 12 MHz. It was fun to visit with my old friends!<p>FWIW, all of the CP/M 2.2 code and all of the utilities are available around the Internet in source and executable form. Including MAC, in my opinion the best macro assembler around. Oh, and BSD C is out there as is PL/I and some other languages.<p>A couple of weeks ago I was looking at getting one of the fast Z80s with memory management, 64k x 8 of CMOS RAM, a small EPROM and building a robot controller with CP/M on CF as the OS. Now I could use the robot as it's own development system. I am not aware of many robots that don't require a cross platform. My FPGA platform accepts a PS/2 keyboard and output VGA (text only). I added that feature after I had a simple serial console working.<p>Today, I would look at the Z80180 running at 30 MHz because it has a lot of internalized peripherals. Very nice! CP/M would SMOKE at that speed!

I have to agree the 8085 is a pretty good device. The Z80 is just as good. The problem with SDK-85 is that it is probably not made anymore, if it if, then I would probably have gotten it by now. <p>I'll spit out a few links and see if I hit the nail on the head. <p>http://www.oshonsoft.com/8085.html for 6 euro thats pretty good although it might not have what you want.<p>http://cybernetics.freewebspace.com/idea85/
This one is free, I dont know if it is the one you want, its assembly based which isnt that hard to do for such a simple processor. Also this project isnt fully completed. Also you need a linux system.<p>http://www.download2you.com/details_pag ... tleID=2434
another freeware simulator. <p>There are other simulators on the web if you look hard enough, but most of them use assembly which is ok, since you are building a robot programming near the machine level is perfect. Unless you can program using 1s and 0s

If I'm not mistaken, both the Tandy Model 100 and the NEC PC-8300 (of which I have many) were based on the 8085. There is a Rom software package called Cleuseau(sic) By Polar Computing (long gone) that fits into a rom socket and gives you BASIC enhancements and a full 8085 assembler and monitor. Pretty neat. I have also used Dunfields 8085 C dev system but that does require some run-time module (I believe). I think the Z80, however, was a much more capable, easier to use, and more fully supported processor. I still have an old DOS based Z80 simulator by Avocet that was quite nice for working with Z80. Viva la HL register pair.

Hi All...<p>Sorry for my delay...<p>I think that I must have made myself unclear...my robotic intention does not need to be rad hard. I just mentioned that NASA used a rad hard variant of the 8085 in one of the mars bots...very low electrical power version. I do like the 8085 for a varity of reasons, namely, that years ago, that is what first device that I learned to program on a low bit twiddeling level. Fun Fun Fun!<p>My robot will simply be a platform for experimenting with obstical avoidance and target recoginition and spatial mapping in 3D. I have no alusions of using the 8085 to do those types of calculations...That will be a much more powerful unit, at a much later time. The 8085 will be an intermediate device used to control and send commands to the u-controllers (PIC and BSII) that work the servos (which take care of the walking routines, and which also will take care of some of the sensors. The 8085 will also be in charge of the arm for grabbing small things of interest, and a second much less capable arm that will have a high intensity lamp on it. When these arms are not being used, they will fold up and stow away. <p>The SDK unit is very hard to find, and I have only seen one on e-bay in the past year or so, and it got up there in bid price. I use a more modern board from Emac, and it has worked like a champ. (It is too big for the robot project, but it is a very good hardware platform for software developement. I will need to either find a much smaller board, or, unfortunately I will need to hire out a design and build.) I bought Emac's micro C compiler, which is good but expensive, but I would like a windows based IDE with compiler, decompiler, debugger and a medium powered TE that is better than notepad but much lighter than a WP program. I am leaning towards the Dunfield product, which was highly recommended to me by someone on the parallax forum. Ultimately, I will tweak using assembley, but for now, concepts will be done in C.<p>Lastly, I have never used the Tandy machines, but I remember that there was a cart available from Commodor for the 64 that had a Z80 in it, and with the right software, one could toggle back and forth from the commodor OS and C/PM. That was neat, but it cost more than the 64 itself. I truely miss the Commodor mentality of computing. If they were still around, they would be the best gaming and video machines around.<p>All the best,<p>Joe

Well, maybe this isn't very welcome but I would not encourage some one to develop with the 8085.
- Fairly slow.
- not very good on power consumption (cmos ok but newer chips are orders of magnitude better)
- limited integrated peripherals<p>A PIC or AVR or 8051 family would be a much better choice for a robot. Much much faster, good low power operation and a really wide range of integrated peripherals make one of them a really good choice. good tools exist for all of these.<p>Well, I said my peace. good luck with what ever direction you go.

Hi Philba...<p>I am not a evangelist for one u-processor over another...I am more of a math person than a hardware developer/designer, and unfortunately have limited experiance, mostly with intel 8 bit units and the Z-80. This is really a learning experiance for me, because my coding skills also leave a little to be desired. There are some awsome processors out there, and they all make the first computers that I ever worked on so many years ago look very pale by comparison. The main reason that I chose the 8085 (and that choice is not set in stone), for this phase of my project, is that I am more familiar with it than say the Motorola processors or the 32 bit intel units. My whole design philosophy is to start simple, one feature at a time, then add things as I need or think of them. That is why I like the BS2 pic units...they are minimalist, and very 'lego' like. However, they have some limitations, but for what they do, they are execelent, and I am using at least four of them on this project, maybe more. The 8085 (if I use it) will be the liason between the BS2s and the peowerful 'top' processor, which at this time, have no clue as to what I will use. Must be an absolute math killer, though. I do wish that there was a company like Parallax or Emac that made a trainer/learning kit for the 8051 like what exists for the BS2.<p>All the best,<p>Joe

Joe,<p>I doubt that it would take you any time at all to get up to speed on an 8051 core processor and very much worth while. I think by comparison the 8051 controller had an easier to learn instruction set than the 8085 or Z80... well OK maybe about the same though the 8051 is more orthogonal. Philba is right though. You could do hacked (meaning less efficient) math routines on an 8051 or Atmel device (ATmega) and still come out ahead over the 8085 by leaps and bounds. All the math stuff you could want is out there in either assembly or C or whatever.<p>I have used the Keil development stuff for 8051 (not cheap) and I have used the very affordable CC5X compiler ($300) that can be used inside the free MPLAB IDE by Microchip with great success.

my master pavlov made me do it...<p>So, you are building a system with at least 3 different processor types. Cool, but be afraid. If it were me doing it, I'd try to just pick one processor family (or even 1 type) so the development tools wouldn't get out of hand. A huge challenge will be communications - when you get past 2 processors, complexity can balloon. I would think the communication architecture through in advance, even before selecting the processors. Hope you are up on that area. Done right, it can make a project easy, done wrong, a nightmare.<p>Phil

There is no doubt that I am strongly in the Atmel ATmega128 camp having essentially defected from the PIC world. I like the hardware and the AVR Lib stuff is great. Just not having to deal with memory issues does it for me.<p>That said, I would still consider anything that could run 8080 code just so I could use CP/M as an OS. How many robots even have an OS, much less serve as their own development system?<p>So, use a Z80180 with CP/M and hang PIC 16F877s on the bus using their master parallel mode. Very simple communications! They would just look like intelligent peripherals.