16KB ROM on the RC2014

Spencer Owen's RC2014 Mini is a nifty little Z80-based computer.

Spencer ships it with a 64KB ROM containing Grant Searle's BIOS and rendition of MS BASIC. Since the Z80 supports only 64KB of memory space in total, the 64KB ROM is split into 8KB pages. The BIOS+BASIC resides in the bottom-most 8KB page.

I had taken Grant's BIOS, mated it with a heavily modified version of Josh Bensadon's Monitor program and then appended John Kerr's inline disassembler to create the Monitor/Debugger for the RC2014. This all took up close to 3KB of ROM (I used a 32KB AT28C256 device).

MS BASIC would take up close to an additional 8KB of ROM.

So I had to find a way to tweak the RC2014 to decode the ROM space as 16KB pages. In this way, I would be able to fit the Monitor/Debugger plus BASIC into the 16KB space.

This was done in a 4-step process.

Step 1: Lift pins 11, 12, 13 of U1 (74HCT32 on the RC2014 Mini). This will prevent the ROM address decoder from using the A13 line.

Step 2: Remove the S1 jumper. This will leave the A13 pin of the ROM chip available.

Step 3: Flip the board around, and short pins 11 and 12 of U1. We are passing the output signal of the U1C gate to the ROM chip select pin.

Step 4: Wire link from pin 13 to the middle pin of jumper S1. Alternatively, you can wire to pin 26 of the ROM chip (U6). This is to wire the A13 address line from the Z80 CPU to the ROM chip.

And voila, you have now enabled 16KB of ROM space from 0000H to 3FFFH.

The Monitor/Debugger + BASIC ROM image is available from GitHub here. Grab the "monbas.rom" file.