Cambridge Z88 Copy tool

Not entirely ZX Spectrum related but this is my first and only contribution to the Z88 world so I don’t want to separate it from other Speccy stuffz.

It’s not a big deal. You can transfer files between your Cambridge Z88 and Windows PC via a serial port in both direction. The COM number, the baudrate and the software Xon/Xoff mode can be changed optionally. Supports multi file transfers and wildcards.

You can download the binary executable for Windows or the complete Free Pascal source code. Enjoy!

Basically I used it to transfer the Z88 Forever application roms to my expanded Z88 either to install into RAM or burn into an EPROM cartridge. To effectively use this tool at least a 128KB memory expansion cartridge is required since the internal 32K RAM fills up quite quickly.

This tool supports the built-in Import-Export transfer protocol. If you want to change the baudrate or Xon/Xoff settings don’t forget to change it under Z88’s Control Panel too.

This is a very basic ASCII protocol: non-ASCII characters must be escaped. The ESC character code is decimal 27.

File transfers starts with the following sequence: ESC, “N”, “filename”, ESC, “F”, “data”

Transfers can be ended either by ESC, “E” or ESC, “Z”. Latter is for batch transfers.

Non-ASCII bytes are represented by four characters: ESC, “B”, H, L – where H/L is high/low hex nibble. For instance, the hex A9 byte should be sent as ESC, “B”, “A”, “9”. This can bloat the transfer multiple times, so be patient.

The Import-Export popdown support batch receive. You can send multiple files in one go. However, it supports only sending one file at a time.

You have to build a custom serial cable to be able to transfer files. The Z88 serial port pinout:

1. do not use
2. TxD
3. RxD
4. RTS
5. CTS
6. do not use
7. GND
8. DCD
9. DTR