Over the past years I’ve explored many ways how to combine my memories of computing of the 1980’s with my quest to better understand how a CPU works and using contemporary technology for the purpose. Here’s another cool approach to do this by emulating a Busch 2090 4-bit computer on an Arudino.
The Busch 2090 was an early 1980’s learning kit, mostly sold in German speaking countries in Europe. It’s the first computer I wanted, but never got, and you can find some details I’ve put together about it here. The next logical step after having understood how this computer worked is to emulate it on new hardware. And this is what Michael Wessel has done on an Arduino!
There are more videos on Youtube here and the source code for his project can be found on Github. My modest contribution to the project was a ROM dump of one of the built in programs to make the emulator as complete as possible. Dumping the program almost felt like typing in endless rows of hex numbers from a magazine back in the pre-Internet days. Relive the experience!