Javascript emulator for Notch's DCPU-16

by jazzychad • 14 years ago

33 16 14 years ago

calibwam• 14 years ago

It seems as though HN had a nerdgasm, and now everybody wants to make an emulator for something that's not even released. What is the point of this? Everybody here knows it's possible to emulate a CPU in any Turing complete language, so why do we need an emulator for the same computer in every programming language there is?

mistercow3• 14 years ago

Well, I think what happened was that this morning everybody saw that Notch had released the spec, and then about 1% of our ranks said "Hey I bet it would be a fun project to implement this spec in my favorite language! I'll bet that definitely nobody else is going to do this." Then that poor, misguided 1% set to work, and the rest is history.

RodgerTheGreat• 14 years ago

If doing something allows you to learn, it doesn't matter if someone else has done it before.

barrybe• 14 years ago

It's fun? A lot of people build things for fun, you wouldn't tell someone building a table not to do it because we already know how to build tables.

jtauber• 14 years ago

There's nothing wrong with reinventing the wheel if your goal is to teach yourself more about wheels.

Understanding something by implementing it in a favourite programming language is at the heart of being a hacker.

jack-r-abbit• 14 years ago

Right... it is not released yet. But if you have emulators you can write code for it now. And then when it IS released... BAM!... programs are already written to use on it. Am I wrong here?

zellyn• 14 years ago

I'm guessing you didn't program a 6502-based computer in assembler in the 80's?

tptacek• 14 years ago

As long as everyone's talking about instruction sets and writing emulators and critiquing architectures and not pumping Bitcoin, who cares? Thanks, Notch, for temporarily fixing HN. :)

jazzychad2• 14 years ago

Exactly. It's like everyone forgot what the "hacker" in Hacker News means. This is the kind of stuff I live for.

robertpateii• 14 years ago

This site is named Hacker News. The word Hacker is used in the hacking things together, apart, and back again sense. Like a hobbyist. What else were you expecting from this crowd?

itsboring• 14 years ago

It's just really low-hanging fruit I think (the spec is crazy simple), and people are understandably excited to get to work on something of the sort vs. boring day job stuff.

I think we'll see a massive wave of python/javascript implementations, a few C/C++/C# ones, and then finally a trickle of novelty implementations in haskell, lisp, brainfuck, etc. This part could last for months. :)

tlb• 14 years ago

Am I missing the part where the registers and memory are 16 bits?

  this.data = new Array(size);
  ...
  a = d.data[pa];
  b = d.data[pb];
  ...
  case 0x2: // ADD a, b
    res = a + b;
  ...
    d.data[pa] = res;

jazzychad2• 14 years ago

oops, meant to be

  d.data[pa] = res & 0xffff;

updated, thanks!

Javascript emulator for Notch's DCPU-16

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