This chimera is a microcontroller emulation of a UK101, an 8-bit microcomputer from the early 1980s. Needless to say I had one; it is a shocking thirty-three years since, as a spotty teenager, I soldered one together over the course of a few days. I recall the kit cost the equally shocking sum of £99.95 (a lot of pocket-money), and had to be smuggled through Irish customs in my parents’ car because the Single European Market was at that time merely a twinkle in M. Delors’ eye. In its original configuration it had 1k of user RAM, 1k of display RAM, 8k ROM Basic (from Microsoft) and a 2k ROM monitor. When it went to its present resting place in the attic a couple of years later, it had 16k of user RAM, 2k of display RAM and an additional 6k of utility ROM, all piggy-backed on the original chips.
The last time I had patently too much time on my hands, in 1997 (seventeen years!), I hacked together a software simulation of it. I had intended this to be a general purpose simulator but it fell by the wayside after the UK101. In the intervening time I’d often regretted not writing the simulator in Java (indeed, a very good Java-based simulator now exists) but luckily where microcontrollers are concerned, C/C++ is still the only game in town, and most of the code compiled under the Energia IDE.
The hardware is almost insultingly simple, there are five components:
- A Stellaris Launchpad from Texas Instruments,
- An SD card drive,
- A TFT LCD boosterpack,
- A PS/2 socket,
- A PS/2 keyboard.
For more Details: Retrocomputer Resurrection
