Altair 8800 Clone | Hacker News Reader

Altair 8800 Clone

altairclone.com

28 pointsrbc28 comments

I am a bit disappointed that only the look&feel was cloned not the internals. It's just a PIC24FJ128 in an over-sized case. I would much prefer to have a clone that comes with a thick manual and that you need to solder for 2 days. That would be fun. Something ala Ben Eater computer but more pro.

The pricing page is funny, especially the old price listing saying how much you get for "free" with this kit. You start expecting an unreasonable price after that and indeed you are not disappointed.

It's just a PIC with a hand-rolled clock-accurate emulation of the 8080 and the supporting circuitry. That's not a small amount of effort.

So far as I know the 8080 has been EOLd, so it would be hard to source it today anyway.

Z80 is still in production. Not the same but very close. Even FPGA is a lot more appropriate than a damn PIC.

BASIC didn't run properly on the Z80 due to some of the optimizations relying on very minor differences between them. The CP/M version was later patched to support it but the earlier "bare metal" versions typically run on an Altair would crash.

http://altairkit.com doesn't seem to be available any longer, but it was what you describe. An actual replica instead of just a functional and cosmetic clone.

You can still find new replica CPU, RAM, and probably backplane boards out there for sale, so if you wanted to build your own replica, it's not impossible. Figuring out the case and the front panel would be the hard part, I think.

Thank you for the link. I could download the full schematics from the site and also the original assembly manual! Nice.

BTW On my personal TODO list I have this project: http://www.malinov.com/Home/sergeys-projects/minimax8085

I wonder if the PIC could drive an actual S100 bus so you could plug boards into it?

I would much prefer to have a clone that comes with a thick manual and that you need to solder for 2 days. That would be fun

I'd like a real clone, too. But there are two things in the way:

1. I'd like a pair of eight inch floppy drives, like I used to have. I miss those proper storage beasts.

2. I'd have to wait for my wife to die, because there's no way she will ever allow me to keep something like that in the library. I'm barely allowed to keep my Atari 2600 in the living room.

I have an original, real Altair 8800. They aren't super solidly built (lots of individual wires), and having been sold as kits, the assembly quality on them is very variable. Among the many tens of vintage computers I own, the Altair is definitely the most finicky to keep running.

If you're interested in understanding what it was like to use an Altair 8800, the software available for it, etc., this is a great way to go. I've been really tempted to get one myself.

In what way(s) is it finicky?

Been daydreaming about a full-size working replica of an IBM System/360 processor unit (mostly empty, with an RPi Zero inconspicuously glued to one of the corners inside).

Oh no, you’ve given me ideas now... How about old wardrobes painted to look like the cabinets? You could even get an old reel to reel tape player and put it behind some plexiglass for that tape drive effect.

If you want an 8800 you can use to measure things, check out the Digirule 2. An entire 8800. In a ruler.

https://bradsprojects.com/digirule2/

This YouTube channel has a ton of great Altair videos. I learned so much! https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB3mwSROoJ4KLWM8KwK0c...

A computer with a backplane form-factor that mimicked the old S-100 bus but with modern components (and a modern bus speed) would be much more interesting.

Something like https://www.tindie.com/products/semachthemonkey/rc2014-pro-h...

$621

assembled. which seems a fair price. dude certainly isn't going to retire on the proceeds.

For comparison, a real Altair is typically listed for thousands of dollars on eBay.

There's also an IMSAI 8080 replica here: https://thehighnibble.com/imsai8080/ It's pretty much the same computer (8080 cpu, S100 bus, CP/M), but the front fascia is usually thought of as more "pretty".

The IMSAI 8080 was considered a clone of the Altair at the time.

Indeed it was. The thing that made it special was that it used the same backplane and board dimensions, making it completely compatible.

This is pretty damn cool: https://thehighnibble.com/assets/img/IMSAI_Desktop.9d18f55c....

Yeah, that's "Z80 pack", basically the emulator with a nice browser based UI, cross compilers and assemblers, and also includes front panel emulations for Altair and IMSAI: https://www.autometer.de/unix4fun/z80pack/

Also see the Cromemco front panel: https://www.autometer.de/unix4fun/z80pack/screenshots/cromem...

Also on Github: https://github.com/udo-munk/z80pack

It started with just Z80 emulation, they added the 8080 later.

If you don't care as much about the authentic look, there's an Altair clone on eBay that faithfully recreates the buttons, switches, and LEDS in the right places, but doesn't look like the Altair. I have one of these myself. It's $99. https://www.ebay.com/itm/RETRO-ALTAIR-8800-S100-Arduno-CLONE...

Says it runs Zork. That's my benchmark.

It does! https://gunkies.org/wiki/Zork#CP.2FM_.288080.2F8086.29

I thought your comment was some kind of inside joke about the Altair 8800. I lost 15 minutes to google, trying to figure out what was special about memory location/address $621!

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