[sebhc] what's this emulator?

[ab31 at juno.com]

Hi, this is Andy Becker. I helped Dave Shaw test and tune up his "Project
8080" H8 emulator for the Macintosh a while ago. It was much too slow for
my Macintosh 7100/80 when I first tried it. The Power PC Versions run a
little faster than a real H8 for me.

I never owned an H8 but a few years ago a bought an H89 and an H100 (or
is it HZ1000?). The H89 came with a lot of books and disks. Neither works
quite right. The H89 seems to have a mismatch between the serial
parameters of the CPU board and the terminal board after it boots a disk.
It has some kind of fast replacement motherboard. The H100 has a hard
disk and it boots ZDOS (like MS-DOS) but I think it had one bad letter
key and I was not able to use the floppy drive. Some day I intend to fix
them. I moved recently and they are packed up.

I am familiar with some of the older computers. I learned about BASIC in
high school on some kind of minicomputer (maybe a PDP-8) and later a
Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 1. Later my Dad bought a TI-99/4A and I made
lots of BASIC programs with it. Then I collected lots of other older
popular Models. Lately I've been trying to write a word processor in
BASIC, and learn about internet security, Javascript and HTML. I've tried
some other languages including Fortran, Pascal, assembly language (three
versions), Forth and C. I'm only confident with BASIC.

I see Dave Dunfield is working on an emulator for PC computers. Is this a
version of the emulator for the Macintosh or something completely
original? What are the requirements for it? Does it need Windows? I have
a Compaq Pressario 2200 which has a 180 MHz 486 (actually a MediaGX) and
32 MB RAM. It works nicely with the Altair emulator, about five times as
fast as a real Altair. Dave, if you're converting "Project 8080" you
should know that there were some minor problems left in the CPU. I think
a flag register bit called "auxiliary carry" was not always set right.
Most software doesn't use that so it didn't make much difference. I have
some books about the 8080 and Z80 processors which I used as a guide when
making segments of code for the CPU. I'm not sure if I could find them
quickly or not. I remember having some ideas to make the CPU run a little
faster that didn't get into the emulator.

I'll try to download that emulator (assuming it's available by internet)
and give it a try. I plan to visit the library and download it to a
floppy disk. I don't trust the internet on my PC right now. Strange
things are happening, like certain files getting corrupted, the recycle
bin no longer storing deleted files, and hard disk activity when I read
certain spam e-mail messages. I decided to downgrade to an old version of
the Juno e-mail software that doesn't understand attachments and HTML.
After examining the messages that cause disk activity, I decided that the
cause is probably something in the e-mail header called "X-MAIL-INFO"
with a long string of hexadecimal digits after it. My guess is that it
has meaning only to the Juno program. I hope I can find some kind of
virus scanner or spybot scanner that will identify the problem.

Andy


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