Spare Time Gizmos has a pretty neat COSMAC kit. It has BBU ( Battery
Backed-Up ) 32K SRAM and the EPROM has an ASSEMBLER, EDITOR, Tiny BASIC,
FORTH and " provisions " for CHIP-8. Plus this kit allows use of 1802s,
1804s and 1805s ( jumper selected ).
For the lazy bastards ( like me ) you can download a " virtual " COSMAC ELF
( 84 K zip file ) from;
http://incolor.inetnebr.com/bill_r/computer_simulators.htm
It even has graphics generated from a " virtual " 1861. And did I mention
the price is right ( free ) ?
Best regards, Steven Canning
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ethan Dicks" <ethan.dicks at gmail.com>
To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts"
<cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Friday, February 03, 2006 11:39 AM
Subject: Building electronic projects from 30-year-old articles (was Re:
OldComputer Collecting vs Electronics Building)
On 2/3/06, Richard <legalize at xmission.com>
wrote:
In article
<f4eb766f0602030407o3dac064amaac33e0f6fb09e0 at mail.gmail.com>,
Ethan Dicks <ethan.dicks at gmail.com> writes:
Two years ago, I built a COSMAC Elf right out of
the pages of the
1977-1978 Popular Electronics articles, on perfboard...
Is the Popular Electronis article scanned online? This sounds kinda
cool! And a nice way to get a little experience without damaging
anything hard to find.
http://www.incolor.com/bill_r/elf/html/elf-1-33.htm
I even used real HP displays (electrically identical to TIL-311s, but
in a different package) and 1822 (5101) 256x4 SRAMs. If you are
shooting for software compatibility without a slavish devotion to the
1976 appearance, you can use a modern 32Kx8 SRAM and even add a latch
to access memory over 256 bytes (but toggling in that much data is
kinda tedious).
You will find it hard to locate a genuine 1861, but Spare Time Gizmos
has a modern 1861 pin-compatible emulator (a shift register, a
counter, and two 22V10 GALs) that fits in the socket for a real 1861.
If you don't care about video, you can get a newer 1802 processor and
run the entire thing at 5MHz.
For those that don't know, there's a reasonably active 1802 group on
Yahoo...
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cosmacelf/
... I'd recommend it if you want to play with the 1802.
-ethan