![imsai 8080 emulator linux imsai 8080 emulator linux](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/P_kpwbIkFjo/maxresdefault.jpg)
There’s not much design factor went into it, just thought that have a blinking light machine is interesting so made that.
![imsai 8080 emulator linux imsai 8080 emulator linux](https://www.autometer.de/unix4fun/z80pack/imsai.png)
The UI ended up looking like the picture above. Although it requires some tinkering to get fully working, compare to writing coding that layout the UI this is not much to complain about. The tool itself is pretty much drag and drop. GTK offered a UI deisgn suite called glade which greatly simplify the process of creating UI. Sidenote: It’s kind of important that it runs crossplatform since our team members use all three major OS platform. This is a very popular X11 based UI framework, it should be cross-platform (Well at least on mac, I think it also works on windows but your milage may vary). After seeing one of my friend drown in Qt land, I decided to try something different: GTK+ 3.
![imsai 8080 emulator linux imsai 8080 emulator linux](https://www.linuxjournal.com/files/linuxjournal.com/linuxjournal/articles/041/4160/4160_cocogame.jpg)
The power supply was larger and less electrically noisy, and the backplane was better designed. It was configured similarly (8080 CPU and 4k of SRAM) but it had a splashier front panel graphics and larger, bi-color paddle switches on the front panel.
#Imsai 8080 emulator linux how to#
Writing this emulator the biggest challenge is probably figuring out how to create a decent looking GUI, as I have no exprience in C/C++ GUI programming. The IMSAI could be considered to be the first 'clone' machine, in this case, of the Altair 8800. If you look around for intel 8080 (which is what the system is based on) emulator on the internet today, all you will find is emulators that are tailored towards running games (namely space invadors) however, we wanted to use an emulator to 1) test our compiler 2) help debugging our assembly software when debugging using the real machine could be tricky.