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Comment by abhisek | Hacker News Reader

So cool! Things we would do to re-live the past. Not really into hardware but I remember trying to build an emulator for z80 just to learn how it work for old Sega games

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Can't wait until punchcards make a comeback ;)

Why isn't there an emulation of punch cards using eReaders!

Completely on your side, just wondering how far back do we go?

There are usb-c paper tape readers: https://www.e-basteln.de/computing/papertape/overview/

They even work with phones!

Awesome device, it's so small you could attach to a flipper or have a builtin into the flipper.

Also love their motto: "Solving yesterday's problems today" :)

Now for coding doom in ticker tape ... that should fill up the rest of the afternoon!

Lol :) Interestingly that same site hosts a project related to the topic of emulated 6502, but not cycle accurate, instead 100Mhz in old Spartan-6 FPGA. Unfortunately not 6510, so no plugin for the 'breadbox':

https://www.e-basteln.de/computing/65f02/65f02/ &

https://hackaday.com/2021/10/15/heres-a-100-mhz-pin-compatib...

But! This reminded me of something else:

Micro Core Labs!

Which can either be cycle accurate, or superfast:

https://microcorelabs.wordpress.com/2021/03/14/mcl64-commodo...

https://microcorelabs.wordpress.com/2021/04/16/mcl64-mos-651...

https://microcorelabs.wordpress.com/2021/04/19/mcl64-worlds-...

https://microcorelabs.wordpress.com/2021/11/22/commodore-64-...

https://microcorelabs.wordpress.com/2021/11/29/mcl64-update/

Imagine Durex Forth on that. Ze PoWerRrRr!1!!

> Completely on your side, just wondering how far back do we go?

The main difference is probably that many people had a C64 in their bedroom, so there's a lot of childhood nostalgia involved. Fewer people probably had a mainframe computer with punch cards in their bedroom. ;) Such emulation would probably be more interesting from a pure preservation perspective, and be less about nostalgia.

Tbh it’s not just nostalgia (at least for me). That machine (and related machines) had such a unique combination of limitations and possibilities that 35 years on, I still find a lot of inspiration in code and optimizations that were/are being written for C64 and are directly or indirectly applicable to programming today.

8 bit CPU with 16 bit address space, a simple assembly language, most peripherals accessible by modifying bytes in memory, coupled with a desire to show off and one up each other produced an absolute treasure trove of programming tricks and techniques. Coders regularly produce(d) results that on paper were not possible on C64.

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