This document is intended for everyone who wants to learn Z80 programming in its depth. If you already know the basics of programming, you should just keep reading, I will explain everything from the very beginning. However, if you have no programming experience whatsoever, assembly is surely not for you. Start out with a high-level language, it is much easier, and will help understanding assembly later a great deal. But if you still decide to go on, read everything very carefully.
This guide is not yet finished. I decided to release it, however, to receive feedback about it as early as possible. So don’t hesitate to share your opinion with me at [email protected]. I will consider every idea for the next release.
I’m Patai Gergely (to make things clear, Patai is my family name), a Hungarian university student at the time of writing this guide. I was born in 1982, and started out with a C64 at the age of 8. I used it mostly for gaming, and never went beyond learning Basic. After obtaining a PC, I started programming in Pascal, and at the age of about 12 I got to know the very basics of assembly. Since those times I wrote several megabytes of useless source, like 3d engines, MOD players and loads of other crap for my own pleasure. As I became an international baccalaureate student, I had to buy a TI-83, which opened my way into the Z80 world. I learnt Z80 assembly in about two days (based on my previous knowledge), and wrote Traz in a couple of hours as a CAS (Creativity-Activity-Service, not “Computer Algebra System”) project. Currently it seems that I’m to become an engineer in 2006... I just hope you will find this guide useful.
You can find my personal homepage at http://www.hszk.bme.hu/~pg429/.