MarsMan2020
Experienced Member
This is true. It's always awkward when one has to intentionally limit the technology you can use so as to attempt to recreate the magic and spirit of the original. For some I suppose that means sticking to PDIP, no matter how impractical.
Ah, if only we had time machines.
No front panel for the Zeta, but there is a Bus Monitor board for the ECB-bus N8VEM cards with blinking lights, and one for the S-100 boards - http://www.s100computers.com/My System Pages/SMB Board/S100 Bus SMB.htm
Switches are a little bit harder - the panels on the Altair and the IMSAI used some tricks to "jam" the contents of the switches onto the 8080 bus - which is why later-generation S-100 systems usually didn't have switches once EPROM boards were common for bootstrapping and terminals of some kind were available to use.
One of the users on the S-100 forum has created a 3/4 scale IMSAI panel reproduction, but it only works with a handful of CPU boards and not with the more advanced stuff like the x86 boards that John M. has been working on lately - http://www.s100computers.com/My System Pages/Mini FP Board/Mini FP Board.htm.
Once you start talking about things like FPGAs and things that aren't real S-100 hardware...well Mike's Altair Clone uses a microcontroller not an FPGA, but he has spent a ton of time making it pretty much cycle-accurate to the 8080 and there are like 39 videos showing how to use it on YouTube (hours and hours and hours of video). So if I wanted blinky lights but not real hardware that would probably be what I would get.