Welcome to Philips P2000T website#

Welcome to philips-p2000t.nl, an online resource for tinkering with the venerable P2000T machines created by the Philips electronics company.

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About the Philips P2000T#

The Philips P2000T is a classic 8-bit personal copmuter from the early 1980s, equipped with a Zilog Z80 processor running at a clock speed of 2.5 MHz, providing sufficient processing power for its time. It featured 16 KB of RAM. RAM expansion modules up to 64KB (for a total of 80 KB) existed at the time. The computer came with built-in graphics and 1-bit sound capabilities. Video output was limited to predefined text characters as facilitated by the Mullard SAA5050 chip. Storage was primarily handled by a built-in cassette tape drive, although interface cards were developed to hook up a floppy disk drive as an alternative. Additionally, the Philips P2000T featured a full-size keyboard and various ports for connecting external peripherals, making it a versatile and adaptable computing platform.

What this site is about#

This website is a collection of my endeavors working with the P2000T, keeping old machines alive and designing new hard- and software for the machine. To keep things relatively organized, I categorized everything in four categories, as can be found via the boxes below.

icon-cartridge Cartridges

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The P2000T exposes SLOT1 and SLOT2 for interfacing. Check out many different cartridge designs, from a simple single-ROM cartridge, to multirom cartridges and even a cartridge that can interface with modern SD-cards.

icon-pcb Hardware

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Click here to learn more about the hardware specifications of the Philips P2000T. In this section, I specifically focus on video output and on ram expansion modules.

icon-code Software

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Programming for the P2000T is a fun and rewarding experience. Whereas most users at the time programmed in BASIC, in this section I explore programming for the P2000T in Z80 assembly and in C using a cross-compiler.

icon-tools Tools

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To get the most out of the venerable P2000T machine, I have developed a small set of handy tools. Most of these tools deal with reading and writing to (EEP)ROM chips as this remains one of the most flexible means to enter data into the machine at a hardware level.

Other sources#

If you are a P2000T enthusiast or otherwise curious about the machine, I can warmly recommend these other sources:

  • The P2000T Preservation Project hosts an extensive collection of cartridges, cassettes, magazines, technical documentation and much more on the P2000T. It is also the place of the most up-to-date P2000T emulator.

  • The Retroforum contains a very long thread about the P2000T. The community here remains very active. Note that this page and the majority of its users are Dutch, though posts in English have been seen before and will be (adequately) responded to.

  • Another handy Dutch site is Circuitsonline where one can ask questions of a more technical nature.

  • World of Jani offers an extensive listing of the capacitors in the P2000T as well as a composite video mod.

  • Retrospace offers a very nice online article (in English) on the P2000T.