Introducing Bolverk: 8-bit Microprocessor Emulator
Over the past few weeks, I have been developing a fun little application in an attempt to broaden my knowledge of the way a processor works at a low level.
What I've come up with is a Web-based, 8-bit Microprocessor Emulator with it's own Machine Language implementation. It contains 2kb of memory and is programmable in Hexadecimal.
I developed the "engine" first and then wrote a simple Web-wrapper for it using the Sinatra framework. Check it out here: http://bolverk.andrewbuntine.com. Or fork me on github!
I tried to keep the process enjoyable and did not worry myself too much with the finicky details that would undoubtedly plague engineers implementing a "real" machine. I questioned myself so many times that, after a while, I began to simply ignore my inner, logical self and simply kept hacking away. So even though writing a program to perform 8-bit floating point arithmatic in a machine language implemented using an interpreted and dynamic language is, quite obviously, far beyond ridiculous, I still reached my goal of... well, I don't know... total schizophrenia?
The true usefulness of such an application lies in it's effectiveness as an educational tool. Recently, I was watching some of the excellent Richard Buckland lectures from the UNSW Comp. Sci. course and I noticed that they were actually using something quite similar. The emulator they were using was only 4-bit and contained just 16 bytes of memory, but the concept was almost identical. What a confidence boost!!
Any feedback, bug reports, comments -- please send me an email!