A general purpose CPU simulator

Abstract

The Computer Science department here at USM has two 8080 based machines and two Texas Instruments 960 minicomputers in addition to our XEROX Sigma-9. Our mass storage medium for the mini and micro systems is cassette. Because of the limits of this medium, and the inability for more than one person at a time to use one of these machines, software development has been very slow.One way to speed up this process would be to do all our work on the Sigma-9. That is keep all files on its disc, and use cross-assemblers and cross-compilers to generate object code and test the code on simulators. Thus the small systems would only be needed for final checkout.A cross-assembler and simulator for the 8080 systems were obtained and work begun. The more these programs were used, the more inadequate they seemed. This paper documents the design and implementation of a new simulator.