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I tried to track down that converter for a retro computing project about 10 years ago and failed; https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2038929/where-can-i-find...

A few months ago I returned to the project and completed it this time; https://github.com/billforsternz/retro-sargon

As I should have realised the first time, you can write your own converter in an afternoon or two :-)




CONV-86 came on 8" floppy disk for the ISIS-II operating system on Intel MDS development boxes. Even if you found a copy, you'd need an MDS-80 to run it on.

After the IBM PC came out, everyone tossed their MDS-80 systems when Intel started to provide their tools on MS-DOS.

With the current interest in retro computing, I wish I had saved more stuff from back then. I kick myself for not saving an Intel i960CA evaluation board that I used in 1992. I loved the i960 architecture and developed quite a few products with it.

However, I still have the processor from that board because I replaced it with an i960CF.

http://www.w6rz.net/IMG_0035.JPG


The funny thing is, back in the day I wrote a 8080 emulator that could run CP/M programs on MS-DOS, and then I went the extra mile and adapted it to run ISIS-II programs for the Intel blue boxes we had. There were some 8051 Dev tools I thought were worth bringing over. But that would have been in the 80s, and the 8 inch drives went to the landfill decades ago. So yeah.


Of course if you had a NEC V20/V30 (pin-compatible 8086 clone), it had a special mode for running 8080 code! It couldn't run Z80 code because it lacked the extensions like LDIR.


If you read the GitHub page I linked to earlier you'll see I digress as far as a discussion of the NEC V20 :)


I love retrocomputing. Nice project.

I'm toying with the idea of writing something in C64 assembly (something I never did learn back when I was a kid and owned one). I'm delighted to see there's an active scene of C64 fans coding new games for it even today.

Real life will interfere, of course, but a man can dream...


Funny, I got on a C64 kick recently as well, but it ended up bringing me down a weird rabbit hole to CollapseOS, and now Forth, so I am thinking maybe I'll write a Forth for C64 in assembly for fun. I won't bother googling it, but I assume Csixtyforth is already taken.




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