Z80 Assembly for the Tatung Einstein

The Tatung Einstein is a British computer built around the Zilog Z80 processor, the same chip as the ZX Spectrum and the Amstrad CPC. This course teaches you to write games for it entirely in Z80 assembly language, starting from a single word on the screen and building up, section by section, to a complete playable game.

You do not need to own a real Einstein. Everything in this course runs on an emulator on your own computer.

Please note: the setup instructions are currently written for macOS. All four tools you need run on Windows and Linux as well, and everything the course teaches about the Einstein applies on any platform, but the step by step install for those systems is not written yet. If you are on Windows or Linux you will need to translate the setup lesson yourself for now.

By the end you will be able to write programs in Z80 assembly, put characters and graphics on the screen and move them around, read the keyboard and respond to what the player does, build game logic such as collisions and scoring, and assemble, package and run your own programs on an emulated or real Einstein.

How This Course Was Made

This course was written with Claude Code, directed and tested by Gavin Watson. The Einstein has never been well documented and the surviving books and articles disagree with each other, so nothing in these lessons was taken on trust. Every hardware fact the course relies on was confirmed by running code on an Einstein in MAME and observing what happened, and the experiments that did the confirming are kept alongside the course. If it could not be verified on the machine, it is not in here. We say this openly because we think it is the right way to use these tools, and because you deserve to know how the thing you are learning from was built.