Ted Fried's MCL8080+ Crams a Working Intel 8080 Emulator Into Microchip's Teeny-Weeny ATtiny85
Ted Fried has demonstrated the march of technological progress with a call-back to Intel's classic 8080 microprocessor — by emulating it on a low-cost, low-resource Microchip ATtiny85 microcontroller: the MicroCore Labs MCL8080+.
"The MCL8080+ is an Intel 8080 emulator written in C which runs on the [Microchip] ATTiny85 microcontroller," Fried explains of the project. "Instead of the 40-pin package that Intel used the MCL8080+ local bus is implemented with a SPI serial bus with a number of optimizations! The ATTiny85 is a very resource-limited microcontroller which has only 512 bytes of RAM, 8k of ROM, five GPIOs [General-Purpose Input/Output pins] plus minimal serial bus support. The MCL8080+ 8080 emulation code was developed to save enough space to allow for a small 128-byte direct-mapped cache that greatly improved the performance by reducing activity over the SPI bus where all of the program code and data resides."
Ted Fried has crammed a...
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