28 Jul
1997
28 Jul
'97
3:55 a.m.
On Mon, 28 Jul 1997, Allison J Parent wrote:
The 8088 would be difficult to make a hardware style
front pannel like the
PDP-8e or 11/70s had but a software front pannel is doable with a spare
parallel port or homebrew IO card. It would have to ahve some software to
dump registers to lights based on switchs, load registers from switches
(at least 16 of them for data/addresses) also other things like single
stepping and single instruction would have to be handled. The other
possibility is an embedded ODT like the 11/03, 11/23 or later q-bus PDP-11s
have. IT allows memory display, changing locations, halting, running from
an address and display/load registers from a terminal(console).
I.E Making a new ROM. Well, I do have the IBM PC manual that has the ROM
unassembled in it... I thought those panels worked by playing with the
lines on the CPU. Sounds like more work than I have time to do now. I do
know that E11 lets you pull this off via the paralell port. It would be a
neat trick, if I had time to work at it.