Your website is of course referenced in the Compucolor II chapter of the book. It was invaluable in getting my Compucolor II implementation working. In fact, I even sent you a PR to fix the TMS 5501 chip's behaviour to match its datasheet (https://github.com/jtbattle/ccemu/pull/2/).
I chose the Compucolor II for its simplicity. Its original design goal of cheapness via very small number of components translates is a big win for my purposes because implementing many small special-purpose chips would bloat the book considerably, without adding too much extra value. With the Compucolor II, we can just take the Intel 8080 core from an earlier chapter, implement two custom chips, take the UART from another earlier chapter, and boom done.
In fact, I chose the Intel 8080 in the first place instead of the more widely used Z80 for the same reason: adding the Z80 extensions wouldn't bring anything new to the table, but would increase cruft. Turns out there's a small but reasonable number of 8080-based home computers (https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/q/11682/115).
I chose the Compucolor II for its simplicity. Its original design goal of cheapness via very small number of components translates is a big win for my purposes because implementing many small special-purpose chips would bloat the book considerably, without adding too much extra value. With the Compucolor II, we can just take the Intel 8080 core from an earlier chapter, implement two custom chips, take the UART from another earlier chapter, and boom done.
In fact, I chose the Intel 8080 in the first place instead of the more widely used Z80 for the same reason: adding the Z80 extensions wouldn't bring anything new to the table, but would increase cruft. Turns out there's a small but reasonable number of 8080-based home computers (https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/q/11682/115).