Comment by lioeters | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lioeters | Hacker News Reader

Recently I fell into a wormhole, or rather time sink, playing with a Gameboy emulator that runs in the browser.

https://github.com/binji/binjgb

There's something so satisfying about a virtual machine that fits in a ~106K WASM file, that can play hundreds of classic games like Teris and Super Mario Bros (via ROM collections on Internet Archive). I don't usually play games, but this emulator is so cute and fun, I keep coming back to waste time on it.

Actually, PICO-8 was the last time I felt this kind of child-like joy about a computer.

I get a similar feeling from this Infinite Mac project.

https://github.com/mihaip/infinite-mac

It's so pleasing to see a running Macintosh in the browser. That interface feels like an old friend. The underlying VM, BasiliskII, is a little less than 1MB WASM file. Amazing!

From the entertaining article, I learned about "retrocomputing". Now I know, that's what I'm into, haha. I especially like it when it's virtualized - like a microcosmos.

If you thought that was a time sink, just search for "retrocomputing" on youtube. We'll see you back here once you resurface in a year or so :)

Its a huge hobby with enormous amounts of cool projects. The one that most impresses me is https://misterfpga.org/ where the community has built FPGA implementations of almost all common game consoles and home computers from the 80s and early 90s.

Thanks for the link--this is amazing. I'm still clinging to hope someone releases a single-board computer of classic Mac architecture. I love my old Macs, but I know eventually they will pass-on and having a 68xxx based SBC that could run System 7 would be awesome.

Wait until you see IOCCC entries on emulation. 8086 emulator under 43 KB. PDP11 in a few lines, too, running the OLD IOCCC entries from the 80's inside that emulator.

Crazy stuff.

4043 bytes of 8086 emu: https://www.ioccc.org/2013/cable3/hint.html

Sweet! That is a real work of art. I found a fully commented distribution of the original code:

https://github.com/adriancable/8086tiny/blob/master/8086tiny...

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