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by tasty_freeze
1669 days ago
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It was an interesting choice to include the Compucolor II emulation. It was a very quirky machine with some interesting design choices, but not very popular. Ops website references https://compucolor.org, which I created. I'm glad someone was able to find something useful in it. The site has an in-browser javascript emulation of the Compucolor II. I've written one javascript program in my life, and that emulator is it. It has languished since 2014 other than a bug fix here and there. Eventually I'll refresh the code, and hopefully replace the display generation logic with webgl. The core emulator was quite simple to write, but 90% of the time was spent getting the code to work across browsers and dealing with the infuriating differences in keyboard handling. Maybe things are better now. |
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I chose the Compucolor II for its simplicity. Its original design goal of cheapness via very small number of components translates is a big win for my purposes because implementing many small special-purpose chips would bloat the book considerably, without adding too much extra value. With the Compucolor II, we can just take the Intel 8080 core from an earlier chapter, implement two custom chips, take the UART from another earlier chapter, and boom done.
In fact, I chose the Intel 8080 in the first place instead of the more widely used Z80 for the same reason: adding the Z80 extensions wouldn't bring anything new to the table, but would increase cruft. Turns out there's a small but reasonable number of 8080-based home computers (https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/q/11682/115).