> > Commodore's Z80 in the 128 was due to unnecessary fear that they might lose > > market share to CP/M, when IBM should have been their big worry. > > I don't know all of the details of the ST/Amiga technology swap, but BOTH > > were too late, if the primary goal was competing with IBM. > > That might be Commodore marketing - Bil Herd said that he threw the Z-80 > into the design essentially because he could. :) He's done a few talks on > how the C-128 came about. It's pretty interesting.
It also saved the 100% compatibility problem (in this case, with Commodore's CP/M cartridge by designing it onto the board, and with Commodore Magic Voice, which fouled banking by altering the memory configuration lines in realtime: the 8502 would crash, but the Z80's activity would not be detected and the C= key could be checked to force a C64 memory map). -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckai...@floodgap.com -- FORTUNE: You learn from your mistakes. Today will be very educational. -----
