I had seen a few people talking about a programming system created for vintage computers. The developer named it Turbo Rascal: Syntax Error (or TRSE for short). It’s free to download and use. Most of the coding is based on Pascal but there are some C-like programming methods in it.

I discovered the Multi-Platform Arcade Game Designer by Jon Cauldwell and asked if it could be ported to support VZ200 and VZ300 computers. He said it’d work fine. They already had support for Dragon 32 and Acorn Atom – both which have the same Graphics chip as the VZ200 (Motorola 6847) although the VZ200 and VZ300 only have one hires graphics mode out of all the available modes the 6847 has.

I decided to try setting up Visual Studio for my development environment. It’s not as easy to set up as Notepad++ was, but everything is integrated nicely, including GITHUB support so I figured I’d go with it.

You need to set up a custom task in Visual Studio. You can read about that on the “Tasks in Visual Studio Code” page. Below is a screenshot of how I set up the Z88DK compiler to compile my Assembler and C code together.

To begin your foray into developing for VZ200 and VZ300 computers, you will first need an IDE. Next, you’ll need to download and set up Z88DK development kit and grab a VZ emulator.

IDE

A good, easy-to-use IDE is Notepad++ as it’s free and simple to use. I use a plugin called NppExec to compile the code with a one-button press. You can also set it to auto-launch an emulator, but at this stage we won’t worry about that.

First, download the latest version of Notepad++ and install it. Next, get NppExec. I watched a neat little video for setting this up. It’s quite easy to do.
Download and install Z88DK. There’s plenty of info there on how to do it and I’m sure you can find a YouTube video or two. I have mine installed at D:\Dev\VZ\z88dk
Make sure you set up your PATH and ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES in Windows as described.