A little side project: a TTY Gateway for the IMSAI 8080esp

[ElectricDream]

Hi all,

While waiting for Dave to squash the S-132 / IMSAI 8080esp communication bug that showed up with the recent firmwares (and because I was honestly too lazy to roll back to an older firmware as a fallback), I found myself without my S-132 (lazy me! again) and looking for another way to reach my IMSAI without going through the WebUI.

So I built a small, fun project: a TTY Gateway. In short, it gives the IMSAI a virtual Telnet server port, so you can connect any VT-100 terminal emulator you like straight to the CP/M console over plain TCP, no browser involved. (Personally I'm in love with cool-retro-term + telnet for that authentic CRT vibe: the glow, the scanlines, the green phosphor, and that lovely bulging curved screen bla bla bla)

Very quickly, what it looks like:

• Ships as a single self-contained binary, or as a small Docker image.
• Runs on Linux (amd64, arm64, armv7 for the Raspberry Pi) and Windows.
• Telnet or raw TCP, automatic line-ending handling, WebSocket auto-reconnect.
• A built-in control TUI (hotkey = CTRL + \) to mount/eject disk images, drive the front panel (LEDs + command switches), browse the on-device library (you can even view the files inside the .dsk), and view system info.

It's written in Go, and I had a good amount of help from Claude Code along the way (so please forgive me if you spot anything weird in the code, blame the LLM, not me... mostly ;) ).

To be clear, this is absolutely not meant to replace Dave's superb WebUI (It still lacks a lot of features, like .dsk upload/download and config-file editing). It was just a really fun little project to tinker with and scratch an itch. If anyone wants to give it a spin, feedback is very welcome.

Source, binaries and Docker image here: https://github.com/ElectricDream/IMSAI-8080-esp-tty-gtw

Cheers!

PS: a quick demo video below

IMSAI-8080-esp-TTY-Gateway-Demo-HEVC.mp4