Nowadays, the development for vintage computers is greatly simplified by the use of emulators (… come on… you never used one ? Really ?). However, when the code hits the real machine, it is quite common for it to simply not work. And long nights ahead…

This is even more likely to happen when the emulator is used by only a few people, hence when the machine is not widely known or used.

The VG-5000µ belongs to this category : it was built in France, rather cheap, very basic. A Z80, ROM/RAM and a graphics chip glued together with plain TTL logic.

This was one of my first contact with computers and it keeps a certain nostalgia.

A few emulators exist, but while they cover the needs for the historical software library, as soon as you get off the road, especially regarding the graphics chip, it is rather easy to fall between the cracks.

As my first RetroChallenge entry, I would like to build an interface to inject code into a real VG-5000µ and get the graphical output. The ultimate use of this interface would be to test emulators for accuracy, and regressions !