A few months ago, my new buddy Will sent a couple of Mostek MK38P70 microcontrollers and suggested I could make something useful out of them. Being intel brainwashed at a tender age, I knew next to nothing about the F8 and absolutely nothing about Mostek’s second generation F8, the 3870. However, considering the F8 was the most popular microprocessor in 1977 and the 3870 was the first microcontroller, i was quickly onboard with yet another new project.
A first version of the F8 Single Board Computer (SBC) was been completed and tested, and it was now time to buckle down and figure out why the F8 had such a terrible reputation of being a quirky microprocessor. Fairchild’s “Guide to F8 Programming” has been my bedside companion for a month now, I have assembled hundreds of lines of code, have tested all aspects of the little board, have beaten it into submission, and finally consider myself to be an amateur F8 programmer.
It is time to welcome others to the project by making the build files and documentation available for download. Eventually I will get around to making another version of the board, but in the mean time this version is an excellent development / training platform. Check out the youtube playlist, the schematic and User’s Manual and let me know what features you think should be added to the next revision.
While they last, i have these listed on tindie if you would like one. Eventually this will be replaced with the next revision of the board.