Online / 5 & 6 February 2022

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Z80: the last secrets

Microarchitectural leaks, 45 years later


While writing a Z80 emulator, you might ask yourself: should it be 100% accurate ? Maybe not, if you just want to run old software. But what if you're not and this old software accidentally depends on undocumented behavior ? In this talk we'll explore how, 30 years after its design, a few people on a Russian retro-computing forum reverse engineered an undocumented Z80 register: MEMPTR. And how 6 years later, another even less known secret register was discovered.

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Photo of Anisse Astier Anisse Astier

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