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by Marcus10110 1454 days ago
I have an ET-3400 on the shelf behind me! I was just playing with it the other day. After watching Jason Turner's CppCon talk on writing an i386 to 6502 assembly translator [1][2], I started working on a fork that would target the 6800. I only got about 3 instructions working, but that's really all you need for some really simple test code with optimization turned to the max. It also turns out that someone wrote a fantastic emulator specifically for the ET-3400 trainer [3], and I managed to get my application running on it!

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBkNBP00wJE [2] https://github.com/lefticus/6502-cpp [3] https://github.com/CalPlug/Heathkit_ET-3400

There is something special to me about the idea of writing modern C++, and compiling it for such early microprocessors. The 512 bytes of RAM is a pretty big limitation though. I wanted to try and emulate an EEPROM using an Arduino or FPGA, but got stalled out on the project. From time to time I like to browse through the LLVM backend documentation, but I can't seem to commit to trying to build a backend.