An Easy and Educational Programming Simulator
Jithin Jose and J-Tech Softwares’ 8085 Simulator is a free scientific simulation program of an 8085 programming toolkit. It allows you to practice on programming an 8085 microprocessor without having to get any expensive hardware and risk damaging it while you’re studying and practicing on it. This simulator is geared towards educational purposes, with its user-friendly interface and Simple and Advanced modes for both beginners and experts of programming.
Programming Processors
The Intel 8085 is an 8-bit microprocessor produced by Intel and introduced back in 1976. Compared to Intel’s previous models, 8085 requires less support circuitry, allowing simpler and less expensive microcomputer systems to be built. It was eventually eclipsed by a better model in the later years, but many engineering schools love to use the 8085 microprocessor in their introductory microprocessor courses since the architecture and instruction set of the 8085 is easy for a student to understand. Trainer kits for learning it are composed of a printed circuit board, the 8085 microprocessor, and supporting hardware—all offered by various companies. These kits usually include complete documentation, allowing a student to go from soldering to assembly language programming in a single course. Software simulators also exist to skip the physical side of the course, allowing students to practice programming as much as they want without ruining the processor itself. Some come with premium prices but others are freeware and compact in size, such as J-Tech Softwares’ own product.
Digital Training Kit
Developed by Jithin Jose of J-Tech Softwares, 8085 Simulator is a highly-rated software that lets you simulated execution of opcodes in a graphical environment. There’s no need to use an actual 8085 microprocessor, as this simulator is accurate enough to virtually and digitally provide what you need. 8085 Simulator had been developed with Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and with its simple user interface and two modes of difficulty to choose from, it’s meant to be an easy-to-use software. However, basic microprocessor programming knowledge is still needed to work with this simulator. You should know something regarding the internal architecture, programming model, addressing modes, and instruction set of the Intel 8085. This software doesn’t have a built-in tutorial—in fact, you need to download it separately from the developer’s site—so this truly is geared towards students with prior knowledge of the subject and not completely-new beginners. 8085 Simulator’s features were very much made to be convenient. The list of instructions is organized with their address in a neat table. You can easily assign labels, enter mnemonic instructions with operands, view the corresponding memory addresses and register values. Simple Mode just lets you choose premade instructions and use the INT and RES buttons for interrupting or restarting, while Advanced Mode lets you write instructions yourself and control the execution speed.
Simple and Reliable
8085 Simulator needs some tweaking, however, especially with a good number of instruction errors and some complex instructions not working, but it’s definitely a handy software to have for programming practice. You don’t need extra resources just to work on a processor anymore.
