2019 has been a good year for the homebrew retro computer community.
In the RC2014 universe there have been quite a few new releases, including kits:
- RC2014 Micro from RFC2795
- Z180 Micro and repair/upgrade kits from Rotten Snow
- BusRaider 2 from Rob Dobson
- … to name just a few.
RomWBW has become widely available on RC2014 related designs bringing a great CP/M environment to the masses.
I’ve also made significant progress this year.
I started selling kits on Tindie in February 2019 but things really got moving in mid-July when I launched SC126 Z180 SBC/motherboard kit. I have now sold 180 SC126 kits. With some sales of the PCB only, and others getting their own boards manufactured, I believe there are now more than 200 of this design out there.
One downside of selling kits is that I have had much less time for new projects 😦
The RC2014 based community now includes many very talented, experienced, and active members. During the last year or two, the sophistication of many community generated add-ons for RC2014 has increased significantly. This ultimately led to Spencer restating his goals for the RC2014. With many of the new RC2014 based activities clearly not consistent with Spencer’s goals for the RC2014, a new google group was formed for those wanting to go further.
So what will 2020 have in store for our community?
I fully expect the level activity to increase and for the limits to be pushed further. Personally, I’m not particularly focused on exotic designs and applications. I’ve always liked the idea that designs and products should improve the experience for the majority, rather than push the limits for the few.
I hope to design some more kits and I know some others are planning their own developments. I’m sure many in the community will be doing great things for their own satisfaction and not to design “products” for others. Some of these we will probably never hear about. Fortunately, there is room for all interests and motivations.
So 2020 is looking like another good year for our community.
Happy New Year,
Steve
Small Computer Central 
Stephen-san
Thank you for your releasing SC126 great Kit.
I’m enjoying this board from November last year like this.
I have a question about SC Monitor – SC126
CF128card is working now, and download.com is already installed.
But unfortunately download .hex work doesn’r work like shown below.
U0 in xmodem.hex or other G. Searle’s hex file is somehow not recognized by download.com for SC126.
I am using tera-term and entered chr delay 1ms and line delay 100ms as RC2014 info.
I’m struggle with this issue for entire holidays.
Could you please help me some information?
Regards,
Z180 BIOS 1.0 for SC126 CF128 based on code by G. Searle
CP/M 2.2 Copyright 1979 (c) by Digital Research
A>save 2 download.com
A>dir
A: DOWNLOAD COM
A>DOWNLOAD XMODEM.COM
A>U0
U0?
A>:31F511CDF2083DC28301CDC307310001CDD102CD5B0721910222B5072AB9077CB5CCD1022B22B9072AAE072322AE073E01CDAB033AAE07CDAB032FCDAB0301
Hi Zugan2
I can confirm experiencing similar problems with DOWNLOAD.COM on SC126.
The issue occurs when boot CP/M from the Small Computer Monitor (as you described). I’m not sure what is causing the issue but I assume it is related to the serial port drivers in the CBIOS I supply for use with SCM on SC126.
To be honest I rarely boot CP/M from SCM on SC126. SC126 has RomWBW which provides a much better CP/M environment and includes XMODEM for file transfer.
My guess is that very few people boot CP/M from SCM on SC126 and instead use RomWBW.
If it is important to you to boot CP/M from SCM I’ll look into it further.
Steve