A box from Jameco with a few Z80 chips, some SRAM and some EEPROMS showed up on my doorstep yesterday morning. Yep, I'm going to take a stab at doing a homebrew Z80 based machine. :-)

Assuming I get something useful built, I guess I'll try to get CP/M up and running on it (it's that or try writing my own OS, I suppose), so this may be very useful.

I know what you're thinking... "why, for the love of FSM, would you build an 8-bit microcomputer today?" In my case, it's partly for fun, and largely for educational purposes. I've been a software guy my whole career, and while I've dabbled with some hobby electronics stuff, I never really learned a lot about the low level computer architecture stuff, and the hardware aspects. So I want the understanding that comes from literally building a machine from IC's. I want to understand more about how the data bus works, how I/O works, the timer for the CPU, interrupts at the hardware level etc.

And interestingly enough... I've done some searching and have found some cool projects where people have built Z80 machines and added things like USB support, PS/2 keyboard support, SD card interfaces, etc. Not bad for a CPU that's 30 some odd years out of date.