Get the latest tech news

Cidco MailStation as a Z80 Development Platform (2019)

The Cidco MailStation is a series of dedicated e-mail terminals sold in the 2000s as simple, standalone devices for people to use to send and receive e-mail over dialup modem. While their POP3 e-mail functionality is of little use today, the hardware is a neat Z80 development platform that integrates a 320x128 LCD, full QWERTY keyboard, and an internal modem.

Since much of the information available for the MailStation is scattered across hundreds of mailing list posts and defunct forums, I've tried to assemble much of it, along with my tools, in a central repository that will hopefully not get lost to time and Yahoo! While I was working on this over the past few months, Ghidra was released and included Z80 CPU support, which has been fairly helpful in turning assembly functions into pseudo-C code to better understand what's going on. At this point I've got most of the modem functionality working and can use it to dial into BBSes, though it drops data on faster connections because my putchar routine is too slow to draw lots of text on the LCD.

Get the Android app