This is pretty awesome. Someone is working on a software emulation of my old computer from 1983.
There was already one made about ten years ago to run in MAME but this new one tries to recreate the full hardware experience of using it. It’s still at an early alpha stage but it’s already looking pretty promising.
I have an ulterior motive in wanting to see this. I want to write new 8-bit software with it.
You can see a video of it working here:
John Hardy Developer 
Webasm version coming soon?
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Seems like a good idea. This one is written in C#. Naturally I’d prefer to see it as a web app.
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I don’t exactly miss losing all my work as the computer flakes out and you have to open up the case to reseat the memory that partially crawled out of its socket. Or OSes that have to be rebooted every 30 minutes or so when you are doing complex work because they leak memory or resources.
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Geoffrey Swenson what about working with processors that were never designed for high level programming languages like C ?
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Deryk Robosson that wasm idea is a very good one! Thinking it might be a good excuse for a side project.
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I wrote some assembly on an Apple II. It was pretty simple back then. The highest level language I used on it was GWBasic. Even so, Bill and Paul did a pretty good job with that, because the rounding routines doing math in 32K of GWBasic were actually way superior to the rather antique IBM mainframe that I didn’t want to use. Even tho there were only 8 significant digits, the Apple was getting better answers on the computer math exercises I was writing in Basic (which I translated from the Fortran in the textbook) than the IBM which was carrying 12 places but apparently was always rounding up.
Using the fiddly tape cartridges to store programs was way less work than the punched cards.
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Geoffrey Swenson this is one of the things that is often forgotten about the era, these toy computers were often better than the minicomputers they were replacing. Certainly they were evolving at a much faster rate.
I remember being taught to use punch cards in the early 80s. All the kids at the time thought this was dinosaur stuff but the adults deemed it important.
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