The Agon Light 2

I ordered an Agon Light 2 recently from Olimex, which is a modification of Bernardo Kastrup’s original Agon Light.

It’s a small, inexpensive Z80-based board with a GPIO port, allowing it to be used as a microcontroller board, but it can also be used similarly to an old-school 8-bit microcomputer, as it has an ESP32 that also acts as an IO and VGA controller, and can be programmed with BBC BASIC. Finding a VGA cable was a bit of an ordeal!

I’m not super sure what I’m going to do with mine, but it’s probably going to be mostly the latter. I learned BBC BASIC on the Acorn Archimedes, and there were some non-WIMP programs I remember writing for it that ought to be easy enough to port over and may even be useful. It’d also be interesting to see if the Z80 version of BBC BASIC also inclues a built-in assembler, which was something great to have on the Archimedes.

I’m hoping to document my explorations here.