I had a laptop w/ a NEC V30 (an Ultralite PC-17-02[0]) and I recall it being a very peppy machine even compared to my father's 286. I did some assembly coding on it and I liked having the 286 PUSHA/POPA instructions. I didn't know about the 8080 emulation mode that it has, too, and it kinda makes me wish I had one to play with now.
I had absolutely no idea re: the LinnDrum being a PC. That's really cool. I've never seen one in the flesh, but now I'm wondering if anybody has done conservation of the firmware. It would be a lot of fun to look at the code.
Back in the day I tried running a CP/M program on the V30 alternate instruction set. It didn't work and I eventually tracked it down to the program using one of the Z80-only LDI/LDR/LDIR block instructions. You're not supposed to use those with CP/M but because CP/M ran on many UK Z80 machines like the Amstrads, inevitably real world programs did. The V30 would have been a great way to run Z80 software [in the late 1980s] if only they'd implemented these :-)
Also I don't recall how I worked out that the extended Z80 instructions were causing the problem. Debugging was a lot more complicated in those days, although programs were also much smaller.
I took a look at the V30 manual and it doesn't have an undefined instruction trap. It's an interesting chip, a superset of the 8086 as well as 8080 emulation. It includes bit manipulation instructions kind of like the Z80, along with multidigit BCD arithmetic.
I had absolutely no idea re: the LinnDrum being a PC. That's really cool. I've never seen one in the flesh, but now I'm wondering if anybody has done conservation of the firmware. It would be a lot of fun to look at the code.
[0] http://old.chuma.org/ultralite/index.shtml