An Unlikely Host For An 8080 Emulator | Hackaday
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To emulate vintage microprocessor hardware, it’s normal to find a modern host that provides alongside the number-crunching grunt, sufficient physical connections to interface with its support hardware. Thus if you were shopping around it might be reasonable to pick something with a powerful core and plenty of pins. Yet to emulate an 8080, [Ted Fried] has eschewed both of these — opting for an ATtiny85, a microcontroller deficient in both pins and processing power.
This seemingly impossible feat is achieved by reducing the physical connection to an SPI bus and offloading the support functions to a Teensy. The emulation code is significantly optimized C, and includes a 128 byte cache to speed up matters. This delivers a speed claimed to be only very slightly slower than a real 8080 when booting CP/M, which is quite a feat.
We’re sure that CP/M enthusiasts will have fun with this project, and we especially like the full write-up. Going to the effort of making fake 1975 electronics magazine covers for the project really is going the extra mile, and we appreciate that. Meanwhile if you’d like one of your own, the whole thing can be found in a GitHub project.
If you’re not familiar with the 8080, maybe we can get you started.
2 thoughts on “An Unlikely Host For An 8080 Emulator”
Very cool! The teensy provides ram, roms, floppies. And the 128 byte cache cuts down on ram accesses so the performance is reasonable even though accessing all system memory over spi would otherwise be rather slow. Clever!
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If ATtiny85 worked, how about a more challenging ATTiny10? Only 6 pins, 2 for power, 1 for reset (until it’s disabled to become another GPIO) and 3 GPIO. 1KB, 32 bytes RAM, and not a whole lot of power.
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