Hi Ben Heck and Staff,
I've semi recently stumbled across the Ben Heck Show, and have become completely hooked on your show. I have thoroughly enjoyed all of the the episodes I have seen thus far, especially the Speccy and Apple I builds. I am wondering if your team might be up to the challenge for building a modern version of the Fluke 9010a microprocessor tester. There are many arcade hobbyists who I'm sure would be very interested in the ability to emulate a processor on actual hardware, with the intent of troubleshooting and repairing boards. My understanding of electrical engineering is limited, but it seems it should be fairly straight forward to be able to emulate a physical CPU. I would think several tests could be written, such as reading / dumping the system memory, performing CRC32, MD5 or other checksums and digests on system memory, testing RAM by writing and reading patterns to memory, bypassing the reset signal (from watchdog circuits), testing clock signals, and even emulating the processor itself. I also think such a tool could be useful for prototyping various CPU architectures for making your own 8 bit computer solutions.
Anyway, it's a project I think could be very interesting, plus it also adds a lot of value to various hobbyist areas, such as retro computing and arcade repair and collecting.
Thanks!
Sean Rider
