This is actually a mash-up of two other projects, one working and one not quite. I wrote an ESP8266 8008 emulator that communicates via RS-232 and wirelessly at:


https://hackaday.io/project/28227-esp8266-based-i8008-emulator

I have another project,an ESP8266 based PCXT emulator that isn't quite working and might not ever work due to lack of RAM (and probably skill), started by "MCUHACKER01". So, I took the video guts out of the PCXT project, hooked it up to the 8008 emulator and stripped out unneeded RS-232, FTP, OTA, and wireless functions from my emulator. I then hooked up an ASCII keyboard Arduino keyboard library function (slightly modified for the ESP8266 and this project) and wrote a very simple terminal emulator for the keyboard and NTSC video with limited cursor control functions. A menu system hooks it all together.

This is a completely useless exercise, but it is technically fairly interesting. I've been doing hardware/software hacking for..."a long time" (long enough so that I can remember when the 8008 and 8080 were new and revolutionary)... and I just can't believe that this can now be done with basically a single package.


Ive added the schematic to the files in addition to the code, which is in a .zip file. As you can see, it's really incredibly simple to build.

I've also added an image from another one of my projects, a scratchbuilt paper tape reader.  at:

https://hackaday.io/project/162182-punched-tape-reader-peripheral-for-8008-emulator

The smaller one of the two readers that  I built I added to this project, but haven't updated the schematic.  An image is in the gallery of this project with the paper tape reader added to it.