Are you bored of modern, over-engineered computers like the Amstrad CPC, full of colorful graphic gadgets, way too much RAM and absurdly large, fast storage with 178KB or more? Do you miss the good old days when computers were operated in a robust way with blinking lights and toggle switches? Then we have great news for you!
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Prevtenet just released "PDP-8 Emulator" for SymbOS, probably the only one of its kind for Z80 systems:
http://www.symbos.org/appinfo.htm?00063
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It emulates the legendary DEC PDP-8, the worlds first affordable minicomputer (1965-1975). The emulation provides a working front panel, 8K words of core memory, a teletype (Model 33 KSR), and a paper tape reader/punch. Technically functional and written in relatively efficient assembly, the PDP-8 Emulators' primary goal is to run simple paper-tape software from the early days of the PDP-8 line. It's just another crazy exceptional project developed by Prevtenet, using his SymbOS C compiler development kit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FEoEv5Kpes
(sorry for the bad sound)
The PDP-8 is a very different computer than what we are used to today. It uses a 12-bit architecture with only eight primary instructions, although many more operations are possible by combining these instructions either sequentially or simultaneously with bitwise microcoding, as well as by interacting with various physical or virtual I/O devices. Instructions and data are generally represented in octal, so that each digit (0-7) represents three bits.
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The package includes software such as the Fortran and Focal programming languages, a chess program, and more. A detailed manual is also included, which is a must but also a pleasure to read.
It never ceases to amaze me what can be done using symbols. :o
Amazing! :o
Dear gods.