Hang on that sounds familiar.
I worked at a company that sold Intel Development systems.
That sounds like one of them
Rod
On 01/11/15 14:18, tony duell wrote:
One problem with a front panel on an S100 machine - or any microprocessor-based
machine - is getting access to the program counter so you can tell it to start
running
at some arbitrary address. The Altair/IMSAI panels resolved this with a hack,
jamming
a jump instruction into the processor data lines (not the S100 bus data lines)
via a
special connector to a special processor card.
Although not S100, the Intellec MCS8i was a 8080 machine with a front panel.
There was
no hardware way to start the processor at a particular address (No logic to jam
a jump
instruction onto the data bus, for example). You did have a reset switch. So
what you did
was take the bus over from the processor (thus effectively halting the latter),
toggle a
jump instruction with the appropriate address into the first 3 bytes of RAM,
then reset, and
give the bus back to the processor. That was even the way to start the ROM
monitor program
-tony
