GNUSim8085 is a simulator environment for the Intel 8085 processor. Like most open source creations, “scratch your itch” resulted in this nifty application. The “itch” was the absence of a 8085 simulator for GNU/Linux platform while Sridhar was preparing for his Micro-processor lab exam and decided to create one. Three days and it was in working shape with which he practiced for his exam. Even today, this processor is used in many educational institutions around the world for introductory courses on microprocessor architecture and assembly level programming. Onkar and myself took over the development from Srid a couple of years back and for the past 6 months or so there was not much activity in there. A casual visit to the SF page shocked each of us. There were a hefty number of feature requests/bug reports and SF happily swallowed them without any email notifications. This was not the first time this has happened, and we decided to move to some other code hosting service. After arguing on several providers, we finally decided to move to Launchpad. So here is the new project site.

A new release with a lot of bug fixes and some useful features is coming soon. With this release, we will have localisation support with strings translated into Gujarati, Arabic, Spanish, French, German, Catalan and Esperanto. If you are translator, head to the translations page and start firing in some translations in your language NOW.

We are happy with Launchpad just for some very inflexible structure that it imposes (but thats a different blog altogether) and the absence of a wiki. We are back to active development and are absolutely excited with the numerous feature and support requests that are coming in via email as well as the trackers. I guess the German Wikipedia page on GNUSim8085 did contribute to the sudden rise in interest. Happy hacking and simulating.