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Comment by kens | Hacker News Reader

Even if I were crazy enough to write microcode, there's a problem that we don't have the microcode assembler MU.RUN. Maybe it will turn up on one of the PARC disks we're archiving...

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Theres a mu.run on (at least) one of the disks archived at the Computer History Musuem, listed at

http://xeroxalto.computerhistory.org/_cd8_/alto/.index.html

http://xeroxalto.computerhistory.org/_cd8_/alto/.mu.run!2.ht...

but I don't know if there's any way to transfer it from a disk image to an actual Alto disk?

Thanks - I searched that archive for MU.RUN but somehow missed it. We got a gateway from the Living Computer Museum that lets us transfer files to the real Alto. So I guess I need another excuse for why I'm not writing microcode :-)

Interesting, I hope that the archives end up available to the public. It'd be really neat to build some kind of functional emulator like the visual 6502 to play around in. Do it on a block level for the CPU so you can examine the state as things happen.

Funny you should mention that, because the Living Computer Museum wrote a high-quality emulator (ContrAlto) for the Alto. It's super-accurate, even emulating the microcode and hardware, and runs at the speed of the live machine. It includes a debugging mode that lets you examine machine state and step through machine instructions and microcode. Source: https://github.com/livingcomputermuseum/ContrAlto

ContrAlto was very helpful while getting the real Alto running, and I also use it for developing software such as the Mandelbrot. I wrote a guide to getting started with ContrAlto: http://www.righto.com/2016/10/simulating-xerox-alto-with-con...

Awesome I'll check that out. I think I remember looking back when this started and found SALTO but it appears to be incomplete and buggy. ContrAlto looks interesting.

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