Happy 2021.
A few months ago I mentioned how the venerable 6502 could be simulated with an Arduino IDE compatible ARM board.
The results were a version of Commodore BASIC, which ran at an effective clock frequency of 48MHz with the ARM providing all system RAM, ROM and a serial interface.
Shortly afterwards I came across a PDP-8 simulator, complete with a ROM listing for FOCAL, which allowed a lunar lander game to be played - just like it’s 1969 again.
Over the last week, I found Jean Claude Wippler (Jeelabs) Z80 simulation, which started life on an STM32F103 and after a STM32F407 ended up on a 600MHz ARM M7 - the Teensy 4.0.
The simulated Z80 runs all the Zexall tests at a simulated clock of 158MHz - that’s 39.5 times the thoughput of the original Z80A.
Many of the classic microprocessors, micro and minicomputers are now readily simulated on very low cost hardware - The Teensy 4 is less than $20.
Jean Marc Harvengt has now ported several simulated systems to the Teensy 4.1