The project was somewhat stymied by other commitments and also by an amazing failure of a simple chip. I was putting the finishing touches on a "confidence test" for the paper tape reader, and suddenly only all '1"'s would read. It turned out that the HC165 used for serialization to the ESP8266 just simply stopped clocking out data right in front of me.  Part of the problem in debugging it was that I simply could not believe it. The failure was in the smaller reader (shown to the left of the 8008 emulator) that I built first - the photo details of the build of the PTR  are actually of the second build,  which was large enough for sockets. The first build was smaller, and because I added in the HC14's later, I did point to point wiring of the two HC14 and HC165 chips, which was very nasty, and potentially impossible to fix.

What I would up doing is cutting out the HC165 up to the plastic body of the chip, putting in a new HC165 with the legs folded in, and soldering the legs of the new chip to what was left of the legs of the old chip. This actually worked! however, I did not replace the 0.01uf decoupling capacitor on top of the chip, and there is a bit of noise causing a misread about every 500 characters.

I suppose that proves that the decoupling capacitors were needed... :)

I'll fix that soon, and when I do, updated code and schematics will be available.