Micro pdp8 and PDP-8 emulator with blinkenlights and teletype sound

Searching for more pdp-8 emulators (I haven’t found better ones than the aconit online emu and SIMH), I found some interesting projects.

First the micro pdp8

The main computer is on the breadboard in the background. I first haven’t found the project but found it described here

And this fork of the Python PDP-8 emulator with added blinkenlights and teletype sounds. Needs PyGame.

And this emu for iPad. Nice papertapes

https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2015/02/21/ModeBImperative.html

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When I got my PiDP8, I decided to write my own emulator to get a better understanding on the PDP-8 instruction set. It wasn’t hard and is cycle accurate on a Pi Zero with a good attempt at “ILS” - Incandescent Lamp Simulation although I started it off with a terminal curses version.

Here is a demo of it vs. a real PDP-8:

There was no interest in it on the PiDP8 mailing list who’re all wedded to SIMH, so I considered it a nice little personal project and left it at that.

The design of the software interface to the emulator allows me to run the curses version at the same time as the PiDP8 emulator box too as well as hook in TTYs, disk drives and so on (however with no interest, I never got round to finishing off the disk code - I was happy with it as it was)

-Gordon

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