Show HN: IMSAI/Altair inspired microcomputer with web emulator

gzalo.github.io

4 points

5 months ago

I designed and built a physical replica of a 1970s-style front panel microcomputer with 25+ toggle switches, 16 LEDs, and an LCD display. The brain is a Raspberry Pi Pico running an Intel 8080 CPU emulator.

The main twist: I decided to see how far I could get using Claude Code for the firmware. That and the web emulator were written almost entirely using Claude Code (Opus 4.5). I've kept the full prompt history here: https://github.com/gzalo/microcomputer/blob/main/ai_prompts....

It was able to create the emulator in just a few prompts! It really surprised me that it was able to make a WebAssembly version from the same code (compiled with emscripten) and get the physical layout of the panel from a given photo. It also created some simple working examples using 8086 instructions!

Repository: https://github.com/gzalo/microcomputer

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