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Old 12-07-2008, 11:37 PM
Cappellanus Cappellanus is offline
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Join Date: Jul 2007
Posts: 24
Default Wow!!! Cool emulator....

I'm amazed. After trying the very clever and fun 8088 assembly language emulator, I too had thought it would be cool to have a Java web-based emulator with great graphics, which would be machine independent (and easy to modify/fix since I can't do 8088 assembly code well.)

I've seen the HP vintage calculator emulators, which also show a real picture of the calculators with buttons you can press and slide-switches you can slide. An example is here...
http://www.hpmuseum.org/simulate/hp35sim/hp35sim.htm
but my time and programming skills don't allow me to do it. I'm glad you did.

A few comments/questions:

I like the picture of the Kenbak-1, but not sure where you got it. I haven't seen this picture before, unless you pasted pictures of the screws over holes, and mocked-up the top of the case. It looks great, but it's missing the extruded aluminum handles on the sides, which we've come to expect and love. Is there anyway you could cut-and-paste some extruded handles onto the emulator? It looks kinda like a face with the ears missing.

I like how you did the "load" function. I guess we can cut-and-paste programs into the little input buffer, and I like how the text in a "pseudo-listing-file" documented code file could be skipped over. That allows us to have documentation in our program files, so we can easilly look at it. Great thinking. Now if we only had a simple assembler which would make this format automatically (sure, we pretty much hand-assemble our Kenbak-1 code ourself, so it's not really needed.)

I'm a bit confused by the display showing either location 200 or 377 in run mode. I'm actually not sure at this point how the real Kenbak-1 handles this, but as I like interactive programs, it would be nice if this was correctly handled. I have some interactive programs around someplace, and hope to be able to try them out, when I have some free time.

I looked at the code, or what I think is the code by looking at the source file. Is this the entire source code? Of course, it doesn't have the images and such. It would be nice if the full code was available for bug-fixing or understanding it, before I put too much time into trying to test it all out.

With the loading input buffer, of course the next step would be to have an "Assemble" button which would read in the assembly/machine code mnemonics, and generate the codes. Now *that* would be great. That would be a whole development system, you could add in a code easilly, assemble it, and run it, and modify it. You wouldn't mind adding an assembler, would you? (just joking.)

I'll run more programs when I have time... but that may not be until after x-mas.

Last edited by Grant Stockly; 09-10-2012 at 09:06 PM.
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