New ASR-33 teletype emulator with paper tape reader/punch

[Michael Underhill]

I have wanted a more realistic teletype experience when using my PiDP8/I, but real ASR33s are becoming rare and can be quite expensive. I have been using Hugh Pyle's nice ttyemu teletype emulator, which I found on GitHub. It provides most of the ASR33 experience, l but without a paper tape reader/punch, it does not provide the full PDP8/I and ASR-33 experience I had in high school.

I have used Hugh's fine program as a starting point and forked a new project on GitHub. With the help of ChatGPT, I have completely refactored it and added a simulated paper tape reader and punch. My version currently supports only Serial and SSH backends and Tkinter and Pygame frontends. The Pygame sound module now works with both frontends. It has been tested on Window 11 and Ubuntu-24.04, but not on a Mac.

For anyone interested in trying it, here is a link to the GitHub repository:

https://github.com/progs-n-things/asr33emu

I have also created a new ASR33 teletype TrueType font that contains lower case letters, which is quite handy when you SSH into the Raspberry Pi in your PiDP8. I attempted to create the lower-case letters in the ASR33 font style, but I am no artist, so be kind. The font is included  with my asr33emu project and is available separately with its FontForge file:

https://github.com/progs-n-things/Teletype33

Regards,

Michael Underhill

[Obsolescence]

Wow! That is an major, major upgrade in terms of 'letting people experience how these machines felt back then'. 

Thank you!

Kind regards,

Oscar.

[Robert White]

Looks really good. 

I have run into a problem in installing on Windows11. 

When I attempt to install pygame, I get an error message

Getting requirements to build wheel ... error
  error: subprocess-exited-with-error

  × Getting requirements to build wheel did not run successfully.
  │ exit code: 1
  ╰─> [112 lines of output]
      Skipping Cython compilation

I can install pygame-ce-2.5.7 without error - the community edition.

Am I correct in assuming that this should run with your code?

Regards

Robert

[Michael Underhill]

Pygame does install for me under Windows 11, but it does not install for everyone. It appears that pygame is no longer being actively developed and pygame-ce is the better choice. It is supposed to be a drop-in replacement for pygame, so it should work without code changes. I have updated the installation notes for Windows to install the pygame-ce package. For Linux under Ubuntu or Debian, pygame-ce will require a virtual environment to install and test. I have not tested it in Linux.