> [the Z80's] instruction set reminded me too much of the idiotic intel 80x86 family That is because the z80 was a (mostly) binary compatible superset of the 8

> [the Z80's] instruction set reminded me too much of the idiotic intel 80x86 family That is because the z80 was a (mostly) binary compatible superset of the 8080 instruction set, and the 8086 (while not binary compatible) was intentionally modeled after the 8080 such that there was a program that could take an 8080 program and do the 1:1 instruction mapping from 8080 to 8086 and get a working 8086 program. > I wonder if it would be possible to retrofit an MMU onto a Z80 design Zilog made a number of Z80 follow-on CPUs, and some have MMUs. It is amazing how far they took the instruction set; the Z80380 could run Z80 code as-is, but it also extended instructions to support 32b operations and had a mode with a flat 32b linear address space. I don't recall ever hearing any consumer product using it though.