A complete Intel 8080 processor emulator with emulated UART console and disk I/O, implemented in pure Almquist shell (ash) script. This particular emulated machine is compatible with the 8080 emulator written by Oscar Toledo G. for the 19th IOCCC (2006).
2 variants of the emulator are available:
i8080.ash loads the specified program into memory, where the memory is implemented by 65536 individual shell variablesi8080-rw.ash directly reads and updates the specified memory file in-place; one example usecase is to use /dev/fb0 as memory; because every memory access runs an external hexdump(1) or dd(1) command, memory performance will be poor.Any POSIX-compatible Almquist shell is supported, this excludes ancient pre-POSIX versions of Almquist shell.
GNU bash 2.0 or later is also supported, but a reduced performance is expected.
It may work with other Unix shells, but this is not guaranteed.
Primarily tested with the Almquist shell provided by FreeBSD (/bin/sh) and Debian (/bin/dash).
dash versions 0.5.7 and later, and busybox ash are known to have suboptimal performance.
In addition to a supported shell, some other basic external commands are required by the emulator:
c_basic.bin is a memory image providing Tiny BASIC, a BASIC interpretor; this file is identical to https://www.ioccc.org/2006/toledo2/C.BASIC.c_bios.bin is a memory image providing the CP/M BIOS, for booting CP/M; this file is identical to https://www.ioccc.org/2006/toledo2/C.BIOS.A and B are disk images for 2 emulated disks, not provided here; in order to boot CP/M, you need to prepare these 2 files:SOURCE/CPM64.COM file from KAYPROII.ZIP (For example 7za x KAYPROII.ZIP SOURCE/CPM64.COM);SOURCE/CPM64.COM to A and B.Both variants accept a single path name to the memory image file. Because i8080-rw.ash updates the memory image file in-place, it is recommended to first duplicate the memory image file, when trying out this variant.
If environment variables A, B, C, D, E, H, L, SP, PC and FLAGS are set to appropriate values, they will used for as the initial values of the respective registers to start emulation; this can be used to restore a previously interrupted emulation.
When running the emulator, pressing Ctrl-C will giving a menu for different actions. If you choose to dump registers and terminate emulation, you will be able to restore this emulation state by setting the register values in environment variables, as described above.
sh i8080.ash c_bios.bin
cat c_bios.bin > /dev/fb0 sh i8080-rw.ash /dev/fb0
A=0 B=0 C=255 D=77 E=255 H=238 L=212 SP=61245 PC=64277 FLAGS=84 sh i8080.ash my-last-save
This emulator did not implement the file import support as available in Toledo‘s emulator. You will have to use Toledo’s emulator for this task, if needed.
You may follow the instructions on https://www.ioccc.org/2006/toledo2/index.html or https://web.archive.org/web/20120112040347/http://nanochess.110mb.com/emulator.html to transfer files into your virtual disk images.
The initial work of this project was began in 2021, as improvements to the i8080 emulater in bash that written by NASZVADI Peter. The improvements I made include bug fixes for existing instructions, implementation of new instructions, and disk I/O support, to enable the emulator to correctly run CP/M, as well as Zork I for CP/M; other added features include significantly faster loading of user-specified memory image file, advanced Ctrl-C handling including memory dump support, ability to save and restore of emulation state, and an alternative variant for direct memory file access (for playing with /dev/fb0).
I was excited to demonstrate this version at the time; the result is this video on YouTube, Zork, CP/M running on BASH, with /dev/fb0 as memory.
However, there a serious issue with the original program by NASZVADI Peter; it did not came with a license, to enable 3rd-party distribution permission for the program! Unfortunately the original author refused to license it, so sadly the program remains proprietary to this day.
The solution? Rewrite the entire emulation logic from scratch! This move also provided a bonus that I was able to target the program to Almquist shell instead of bash; this creates a significant performance advantage over the old proprietary implementation, if an efficient implementation of Almquist shell is used, such as FreeBSD ash or dash 0.5.5.1.
Source files i8080.ash and i8080-rw.ash are distributed under the Mozilla Public License, version 2.0; a copy of this license is provided as COPYING file.
Binary files c_basic.bin and c_bios.bin are distributed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.