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Writing emulators is a lot of fun. Great stuff here :) Kudos!!! A little off-topic: I end up doing a sub par job at writing some classic 8-bit emulators myself

• flohofwoe 8y ago
  True, in the beginning it's tough because it takes so long until you can actually run small emulated programs and even then there's no real emulated computer yet, just a CPU. What kept me motivated was that I really wanted to play the games I wrote as teenager again and there were only very few existing emulators for this system, and none as easy to get running as just navigating to a webpage. There was also a bit of (unfounded) fear that those games would be lost since my own cassette tapes have rotted (unfounded because other people took care during the 90's to digitize the tapes and put them on the internet). Once I had the first machine working (which required Z80 CPU, CTC and PIO emulations), it was fairly easy to build emulators for the other East German 8-bitters, and after that for the ZX Spectrum, and with each new machine it becomes easier and the chip emulations become better... Another factor is that the emulators are only like a fallback project which I return to when I don't feel like doing something else (usually I reserve my Christmas vacation for this), and the emulators are also a nice testbed for my other projects (the sokol cross-platform headers, and generally doing WebAssembly stuff). These are small complete applications, yet built from very little code, so they're quite easy to maintain and experiment with.