computer-science
I built a Game Boy emulator in F#
Key takeaways
- I’ve been working as a software engineer for over 8 years at this point, and admittedly I’ve never understood how computers actually work.
- I spent hundreds of hours as a kid catching Pokémon, so the Game Boy was the perfect candidate: real hardware, relatively simple in scope, and something with a strong personal connection.
- Instead of jumping straight into it, I first did From NAND to Tetris.
I’ve been working as a software engineer for over 8 years at this point, and admittedly I’ve never understood how computers actually work. So I figured I’d try to learn how they work by emulating one. Sorry Ben Eater, I’m not going to build one just yet.
I spent hundreds of hours as a kid catching Pokémon, so the Game Boy was the perfect candidate: real hardware, relatively simple in scope, and something with a strong personal connection.
Instead of jumping straight into it, I first did From NAND to Tetris. It was a great course, and it made me really understand the fundamentals of computers, like registers, memory, and the ALU. Then to get used to building an emulator, I built a CHIP-8 emulator in F#: Fip-8.
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