Emulator/Debugger

[drichardson]

I'm glad you like it. I suppose that's excuse enough to keep up on the development.

To answer your questions:

1) The picture is a sketch I made using Macromedia Flash 8. I had planned on making an SVG from the final image, but I got very lazy and just took a screen capture. If I get some extra time I'll add the side rails.

2) An assembler would be a neat feature. Perhaps I can put one together over the next holiday.

3) According to PR-20 of the Programming Reference Manual:

Entry can occur during the Run state. Normally, the Console Data Lamps are displaying the contents of location 200 during the Run state. During the actual interval while the Clear or Console Data Pushbuttons are depressed, the Console Data Lamps will predominantly display the contents of location 377. In the background, as a fainter light, the contents of location 200 will also be displayed.

4) Yes, all the code is (rather inelegantly) jammed into a single source file. My goal was to write the program as quickly as possible, and the results are not pretty. It's an ugly, inefficient, and unmaintainable mess. I'm planning on addressing the code quality issue over Christmas.

5) The lights really are horrid, aren't they? I had thought of making a better 'glowing light' image, but the only suitable format would be PNG, which IE has trouble rendering properly. There is a fix online, but I didn't think of it at the time. I'll be sure to add "better lights" to the list of things to do.

6) Yes, just one pixel on the button push. I tried a few different things and this solution gave the buttons the best 'feel'. Let me know if you come up with a better movement.

7) Unfortunately, I don't own a Kenbak-1. I am, however, accepting donations of any Kenbak-1 hardware (for the improvement of this software, of course!) At present, I have only the manuals to guide me.

Thanks for the excellent feedback. The next release should be very much improved. I'll be sure to credit you.

[Per]

Nice emulator.

My notes:
1. Some of the light conditions are not right. as of I understand, pressing any of the Input buttons will allways turn on the Input light.

2. Would have been great if I could do memory loading from the binaries in a file (mainly for compability reasons, if sombody wrote an assembler for Kenbak Op-codes).

I find this a good start/beta, and I am curious in how it is going to be.

[drichardson]

I'm glad you approve. I really didn't want to step on your toes. I had hoped that my project was 'different' enough to avoid conflict.

1) Yes, I'm not certain how all the lights properly behave. The manual helped quite a bit, as did the demo video online. I've made the change. If you notice any other problems, please let me know!

2) For very good reasons, javascript isn't allowed access to the local file system. I could get around it with a tiny java applet, but it would only work if you ran the program locally. If I get around to writing an assembler this won't be a major problem.

In the mean time, I've written two small programs bin2oct.exe and oct2bin.exe (download them here)

As an example, running bin2oct kenbakd1.ram > kenbakd1.txt from the command line produces a text file that you can copy/paste into the loader. Copy/paste the text from the memory viewer into a file and run oct2bin to produce a binary.

If anyone wants the C source, or a Linux (i386) binary, let me know and I'll upload them.