Screen shot Flight Simulator 2020. The game receives real time weather data and this is a model of hurricane Laura as it was unfolding.

I’ve always wanted to write an emulator. First because I have a lot of interest in retrocomputing, and more particularly, in cracking old school Apple ][ games, but mostly because an emulator has always seemed to me to be a great mix of technical challenge with a very rewarding feeling as you make progress. So I made it my week end project to write a Chip-8 emulator.

Chip-8 is a very popular CPU to emulate and usually the first project people who are new to this exercise undertake, so it was an easy choice. The spec is short and except for a few tiny details, very clear on how to implement this CPU. It’s graphical too, which is important from a reward standpoint. I was absolutely thrilled when I saw the beginning of the welcome screen of Space Invaders appear on my screen after I had implemented just a few opcodes.

You can find the emulator on Github with all the technical details.

I am very tempted to work on a harder emulator now, from a real console. I am fluent in 6502 so maybe SNES, or even an Apple ][…

Screen shot from Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey

• Implementing cosine in C from scratch
  It's always interesting to try and understand better the foundations of what we use every day.
• A portable programming language with an incredibly compact backend
  A language whose back end is the real curiosity.
• Build a Toy Quantum Computer at Home
  The author really means it by "building".
• RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 – The Impossible Maze
  Creating a maze in RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 that will take longer than the lifetime of the universe to complete.
• Guide to Quarkus with Kotlin
  Kotlin and Quarkus.

Screen shot from Star Wars: Battlefront