I wrote a fast serial loader, so I can load data directly from my PC in binary format. This loader is saved on a casette tape for the time being. I will add it to the rom with the next firmware update.

The new serial loader allows for ~5200 bytes/s transfers as opposed to 120 bytes/s for the casette loader. Note that this loader cannot be used to load data from casette tape, but only from the PC.

Yesterday I bought a laser printer at a thrift shop with the intend to hook it up to my 8 bit computer. The parallel interface is fairly straightforward. After some troubleshooting I got it to work the day after I bought it. Right now it prints text pages, but I might be able to draw shapes and stuff using the printer's scripting language.

Here's a picture of the resulting page printed. Sending a full page of text happens almost instantly.

The address decoder of the computer is already pretty complex, yet I want to add one more feature to it. I want to exclude the zeropage, stack and 512 bytes of ram from the bankswitching mechanism. To do this I need to check if the cpu is accessing the first 1k of memory. To do this I can OR the upper 6 address lines and check if the result is 0. Then this needs to be fed into an and gate with the bank select signal coming from the decoder circuitry.

That sounds pretty awesome! Now on to make some nice games for it