A Low-Cost Emulator for Intel 8085A Based Microprocessor Systems
Sanjay Kumar Bose, Sumit Ray · IETE Technical Review · 1985
An emulator-system is a very convenient-tool in developing and designing a microprocessor based digital-system. Typically, an emulator pod from the emulator replaces the microprocessor in the system and allows the user to take direct control of the ‘target’ system CPU, memory, I/O ports and its program execution. In order to provide an easy user interface, the emulator system typically works in conjunction with a host computer or a microprocessor development system. Most of today's development systems do provide emulators for various popular microprocessors. These however tend to be costly. This paper reports on the design and development of a low-cost emulator for 8085A based systems. This cost reduction mentinoned above has been achieved primarily by trading off hardware for software. The emulator consists of some I/O ports, TTL control circuitry and an 8085A CPU (i.e. ‘Target CPU’) which essentially acts as the replacement of the target system CPU. The host in this case is a workstation developed at IIT/Kanpur.