Tag: systems programming

This is a wonderful tiny-hardware project: a Swift-flavored language environment for the Apple II, implemented through a bytecode VM instead of pretending full modern Swift can fit on a 1 MHz 6502 with tens of kilobytes of RAM. The constraints make the engineering visible: disks, keyboard quirks, memory banking, integer-only tradeoffs, and separate tool families instead of one universal binary.

The part I want to keep near the agent-workflow notes is the process. The project worked because the AI had a human boundary around it: numbered phases, design docs, acceptance tests, and manual architectural calls. That is the healthy version of agent leverage: not autonomous magic, but fast iteration inside a context the builder keeps sharpening.

A full account of building Fame Boy — a working Game Boy emulator in F# — covering CPU, PPU, and APU implementation, optimization decisions, and what the project revealed about how computers actually work.

The F# angle is useful: it shows where functional programming fits naturally in low-level emulation work and where it requires deliberate workarounds.