Emulating the Intel 8080 on a MOS 6502
pagetable.com
pagetable.com
Why you would do that is that you could develop and debug code in a way that gives you a lot of visibility into the processor and control: stop anywhere in a non-intrusive way and look at the state of anything.
The only other way to get that would be a hardware debugger requiring a second computer.
In 1978 when Dann McCreary did it? Computers were expensive back then. A crappy TRS-80 Model I with 4K memory would set you back more than $2000 in 2015 dollars. I don't remember knowing anyone who had two computers before 1985 or so...
And I know plenty of other kids my age back then that had two or more machines. That was all that we spent our (hard earned) money on. I'm pretty sure that there were lots of adults too that had more than one computer.
Whatever didn't go to the rent and very basic food went straight into buying hardware, software and computer books.
Quote:
"Honestly, I don’t remember for certain… BUT… MORE THAN LIKELY, it is a FAKE – i.e., I probably just text-edited a listing in “assembler listing” format for the purpose of publishing the code and “looking professional”… ;)"
This happened more often than you'd think. Before the widespread use of modems or other long-distance ways of sending digital data, it was often very difficult to transfer a digital version from one model of computer to another, let alone converting that format to something that a typesetting system could read.
I remember listings in magazines that were clearly typeset manually from people who were just reading and re-typing from an original printout. Bear in mind that the reader was also expected to type the program by hand from the magazine.
Generally the final proofreading was left to the person brave enough to type it all in again. It could be very frustrating to be faced with a program that was clearly exactly the same as the printed copy, but didn't run. On the other hand, it did teach you to be sceptical of what you read in magazines.