[Martin Malý] has put together a sweet little 8085-based single board computer called OMEN. He needed a simple one for educational purposes, and judging by the schematic we think he’s succeeded.
Now in its fourth iteration, it has a 32K EEPROM, 32K of memory, one serial and three parallel ports. In the ROM he’s put Tiny BASIC and Dave Dunfield’s MON85 Serial Monitor with Roman Borik’s improvements. His early demos include the obligatory blinking LED, playing 8-bit music to a speaker, and also a 7-segment LED display with a hexadecimal keyboard. There is also a system connector which allows you to connect a keyboard, a display, and other peripherals. Of course, you can connect serially at up to 115200 baud, making it very easy to compile some assembly on a PC and use the monitor to paste the hex into the board’s memory and run it. Or you can just jump into the Tiny BASIC interpreter and have some nostalgic fun. He demos all this in the video below.
He’s given enough detail for you to make your own and he also has the boards available in kit form on Tindie for a very reasonable price. With some minimal soldering skills, you can be back in the ’80s in no time.
Part of [Martin’s] interest in these vintage computers stems from his having grown up in the ’80s in Eastern Europe when it was impossible for him to have a computer of his own. We’re glad then that he wrote up his experience with home computers behind the iron curtain as well as the peripherals.