COMX Club Forum

Hi,

Today I released Emma 02 V1.27, exactly 6 months after the last release.

Main changes
- Added emulators for the RCA Studio IV, FRED 1 and FRED 2
- Added SW from The Sarnoff Collection at The College of New Jersey
- Added SW from The Hagley Museum and Library: Sarnoff/RCA Collection
- Re-designed pseudo code (dis)assembler and added support for pseudo code for the Studio IV, FRED 1 CARDTRAN, FRED 2 FEL-1, FPL-2, FPL-4, Coin Arcade GPL-A (2K ROM and 2K RAM versions), GPL-2, GPL-3, GPL-4 and VIP STK and Test Word languages.

I think this version has some historical value, I guess you might have seen Kevin’s video which told part of the story. Now you can see these prototypes running in Emma 02. Including the FRED 1 running on a SYSTEM00 CPU which was a prototype in itself with a simplified 1801 instruction set. Also note the large amount of pseudo code languages added! Before this I only knew about the Studio II and Chip 8 languages. The Emma 02 help pages list all pseudo code syntaxes as well as the SYSTEM00 CPU syntax.

One other very interesting finding was the FREDs using tones on tapes which caused the FREDs to stop the tape. As such allowing spoken text on the tape to be controlled by the FRED. Some examples are Fred Demos, Clue, Prog. Apt. Test, Deduce and Add Drill. There is also a Bowling game with actual bowling sounds which start playing when you roll a ball. Last the Animate Demo loads data from the tape more or less directly to the screen memory. None of these wav files are included in the installation packages to keep the size of the package small, however if selected in Emma 02 they will be downloaded after ‘ok’ from the user.

Last finding I would like to share is the tape load and save functions of the FRED 1 and 2 which is not done by the main CPU but via additional HW. This forced me to add functionality in Emma 02 to emulate the actual tape format conversion. This was a first for me as all other 180x computers I have seen so far have used the CPU with Q and EF flags for the tape I/O. I found 2 different tape formats, one using two different tone frequencies to identify 0 and 1s which I have called '5.2/6.2 Tone’ and a second format used later on called ‘PM System’ in RCA documentation. The last used 2 pulses to indicate a 0 and 5 pulses for a 1 with silences in-between the pulses. The PM System format is faster and more reliable than the frequency format.

All SW (that I got running in some way) from the Sarnoff collections at TCNJ and Hagley are included with approval from Flori Pierri and Kevin Martin. I would also like to thank Paul Robson, Andy Modla, Herb Johnson, Flori Pierri, Kevin Bunch and Ed Keefe for their work, input and support for this version. Without their work most of this version would not have been possible.

Detailed change log is included on my web site: , more details about the FRED 1, FRED 2 and Coin Arcade machine will follow later.

Downloads for Linux, OS-X and windows can be found as usual on:

Bug reports and/or comments are welcome.

Cheers, Marcel.