Sick and twisted? Nah! Just lots and lots of fun.

It is a dream, and a wonderful challenge. Back in the early days (I am 50 now) in mid-1974 I heard about the Intel 8080 and set about acquiring a chip. In the meantime, from the early Intel documents I wrote a cross assembler to produce code for it on an Interdata 70 mini.

Go and find some books on compiler design and get into it!

My current favourite hobby project is replicating the Interdata using an Altera EPF10K250A EPLD device. It is about 95% functional, we are just finishing the interface to an original 8k word core memory plane. Using static memory with battery keep-alive we have been able to run our 1974 8080 cross-assembler and produce runnable code that executed on an 8080 emulator.

It may not be efficient, but projects like this are great learning tools. Good luck and have lots of fun!

jdtoronto