ZX80 character set

The ZX80 character set is the character encoding used by the Sinclair Research ZX80 microcomputer and its successor, the ZX-81. The encoding is notable for having no relationship with the more common character encodings ASCII and EBCDIC available at the time of its inception. The encoding is small enough to fit the character codes into a single byte. In fact, only 64 characters are present in the encoding. By setting the most significant bit of a particular character to 1, an inverted character glyph is obtained.

The small effective range of code points (0-63, inclusive) precludes support for latin lower case letters, or symbols used widely in computing such as the exclamation point or the at sign. Block elements figure prominently in its limited repertoire, as these -- combined with the inverse graphics capability -- made support of 64x44 pixel graphics possible.

In the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, the successor of the ZX-81, this character encoding was abandoned in favour of the ZX Spectrum character set, which is a derivative of ASCII.

Layout

ZX-80 Character set

	_0	_1	_2	_3	_4	_5	_6	_7	_8	_9	_A	_B	_C	_D	_E	_F
0_	SP 0020 0	▘ 2598 1	▝ 259D 2	▀ 2580 3	▖ 2596 4	▌ 258C 5	▞ 259E 6	▛ 259B 7	░ 2591 8			" 0022 11	£ 00A3 12	$ 0024 13	: 003A 14	? 003F 15
1_	( 0028 16	) 0029 17	> 003E 18	< 003C 19	= 003D 20	+ 002B 21	- 002D 22	* 002A 23	/ 002F 24	; 003B 25	, 002C 26	. 002E 27	0 0030 28	1 0031 29	2 0032 30	3 0033 31
2_	4 0034 32	5 0035 33	6 0036 34	7 0037 35	8 0038 36	9 0039 37	A 0041 38	B 0042 39	C 0043 40	D 0044 41	E 0045 42	F 0046 43	G 0047 44	H 0048 45	I 0049 46	J 004A 47
3_	K 004B 48	L 004C 49	M 004D 50	N 004E 51	O 004F 52	P 0050 53	Q 0051 54	R 0052 55	S 0053 56	T 0054 57	U 0055 58	V 0056 59	W 0057 60	X 0058 61	Y 0059 62	Z 005A 63
	_0	_1	_2	_3	_4	_5	_6	_7	_8	_9	_A	_B	_C	_D	_E	_F