9010a Emulator + USB

[guddler]

Those on the Tech Tools list will have just received this, but it's awesome enough to share

The emulator's been around for ages and didn't really give you much as you couldn't really do anything real with it. It was still impressive though! At the time I downloaded it and played about with it a bit and thought how great it would be to be able to link it into Mame as an entirely virtual environment for testing / writing scripts etc.

Well, the original author of the emulator has gone the opposite way and now has a proof of concept for linking it up to the real hardware via USB. Still uses the pods but most of us have them anyway so no biggie.

Looking good. Now if he'd kindly do a 9100 emulator we'd be sorted

. I would have thought though that he's done the hard bit? The 9100 is, at the end of the day, only a computer that does a dedicated task...

http://forums.arcade-museum.com/showthread.php?t=173862

 

[karlcdoe]

Great. I was looking at Fluke 'Em a while back but came to the same conclusion about it's (then) usefulness. I'd be up for buying this kit if it were easier to obtain/cost effective compared to the real thing. It a tool I still don't have. Problem is the pods are super expensive, especially the rarer ones. I assume these could be emulated in hardware as well in which case that needs to be added to the wish list. Has anyone pulled the pods apart to see what's actually inside, I assume it's the target processor/processor emulator + supporting harware?

K

 

[guddler]

There isn't masses in them. Least not the common stuff like 6502, Z80 etc. but IIRC, the last time I opened one up there were a few, slightly more obscure parts than we're used to dealing with.

 

[d-type]

I must have been asleep, or just not remembering things...I didn't know there was an emulator out there!

I have a good selection of pods, including all the important ones, from when you could get them all for about 40-60 quid each, I daren't look to see how much they are now.

Maybe, one day, when I get 5 minutes, I'll check out the emulator, could be good fun to play with. (One day probably being when I retire. Fortunately, that day's getting closer everyday...)

Actually, I bet an FPGA could probably do all the pods on one chip, quite easily, it would just need someone who was frustrated at the lack of cheap pods and knew their way round an FPGA design package.

Or, alternatively, mod the emulator to drive a parallel-port pod directly (or a USB parallel perhaps, which a bit of fiddling around)?

D-T

 

[Macro]

The 'customs' are mainly specialised resistor arrays from memory. but I still expect that it would cost more to make one than they cost to buy (unless the chinese start knocking them out)