Altair8800 | Arduino code for Altair 8800 replica

Altair8800 is a C library. Altair8800 has no bugs, it has no vulnerabilities and it has low support. You can download it from GitHub.

I first learned about the Altair 8800 when reading about it in the book The Innovators by Walter Isaacson. In January 1975 this computer kit made its appearance on the cover of the Popular Electronics Magazine (I wasn't evern born back then). It inspired two young guys: Paul Allen and Bill Gates to start a company they called Micro-soft. They build a BASIC interpreter to make this machine more accessible and licensed it to MITS, the company of Ed Roberts who created the Altair 8800. Soon after reading another great book Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold I really felt the urge of creating a replica of the Altair 8800 myself. To get a feeling how the Altair was operated I watched a lot of videos on YouTube from the person behind the Altair Clone project. That way I learned the functions of all the LEDs and toggle switches. I wasn't sure if I would emulate the hardware components of the Altair or collect real vintage components to create the replica. I desided to first emulate most parts on an Arduino because that's a platform I was already familiar with. May be I will later replace the Arduino by a real Intel 8080 (or 8085) chip on which I got my hands on recently. I found some good resources, even a project by Daniel Karling who already emulated the Altair 8800 on an Arduino Uno. I learned a lot by studying his code and PCB schematics. But I didn't want to just copy everything, so I tried to start from scratch, even trying to build my own emulator for the Intel 8080, the core of the Altair 8800. Later I found another well written emulator for the processor by Alexander Demin. I ended up using code from both projects combined with my own code.