License: Cc-by-sa-2.0-fr, Rama, CeCill

Before the Commodore VIC-20 and the C64 were born, MOS Technology Inc. developed a demo board specifically to demonstrate the abilities of their latest and greatest development - the MOS 6502. This little single board computer was developed by Chuck Peddle and is known ever since under the name KIM-1.

The version released in 1976 had 8kB RAM, two MCS6530 PIO chips, six 7-segment displays, two serial ports and a hex keypad. Few month later Don Lancaster provided a low cost video display device, that would render up to 4000 characters on a TV set or a monitor. And one of the first really usable home computers was born.

The KIM-1 is still kind of popular these days. And so Cameron Kaiser decided to invest some time and finalize his KIM-1 emulator for the C64. His own words:

That’s not a joke!

His emulator runs real KIM-1 code using a software 6502 core that he calls "6o6" (6502-on-6502). It [citation] implements protected memory, exception handling and all legal NMOS instructions. In addition, the KIMplement not only emulates those famous six seven-segment LEDs and the hex keypad, but also is one of the few KIM-1 emulators that emulates a TTY connection (an old-school ASR-33) and a KIM-4 expander with 16K of RAM, allowing you to run "big programs" too.

So if you want to play with a KIM-1, but don’t have one at hand, give the emu a try.

(And btw, if you want to program an emulated KIM-1 on your iOS device, check out issue #07 where we speak about John Kennedy's Virtual Kim.)