IMSAI 8080 and SX Symbiosis
DaveG
Posts: 84
About a month ago I acquired a fun new toy and have been busily refurbishing it. See photo. The IMSAI 8080 is the type of computer that was used in the 1983 movie, War Games, starring Matthew Broderick.·
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When I got the machine, several of the red and blue switch handles on the front panel were missing, but amazingly Todd Fischer of Fischer-Freitas Company sells brand new handles for this old machine, which was made back in 1977. Now it looks like new.
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It came without any disk drives to load an operating system so I wired up a Parallax SX52 Microcontroller to the S-100 bus and programmed it to be a DMA Loader. The SX52 and buffers are mounted on an S-100 ·Vectorboard. See photo.
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Now I can write simple programs in 8080 machine code, store them in the SX flash memory and then do a DMA hex download to the RAM boards in the machine. Just for fun, I wrote a program to do a screen print of the games listed in the War Games movie. See photo.
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Maybe I'll teach it to play Global Thermonuclear War. That should only take ten years or so.
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Dave G
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-Phil
DJ
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Martin Hodge
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