Emulators

About

There is a page for every machine, operating system and chip, each cross-referenced, so you can start from a console, follow it to the processor inside, and on to every other machine that used the same chip. Every entry carries its release year, so the whole collection can be browsed by decade and year.

The site is plain static HTML with no JavaScript, in a dark, phosphor-green retro theme.

Features

The emulators

The site includes 234 online emulators, converted from various different formats to WASM and JavaScript so that they can be embedded in web pages, including 167 freshly made emulators. Each emulator's page has notes on how it works and how to embed it.

Each emulator comes with an interactive debugger, which lets you examine memory and view it as hex or as pixel data, for looking at sprites and screen buffers. The debugger also provides disassembly and single stepping.

I cast the net wide, and made emulators for some devices I don't think have been emulated before, including some purely mechanical ones:

• Antikythera mechanism - The ancient Greek bronze gear train, hand-cranked, that worked out the positions of the Sun and Moon and predicted eclipses
• Curta - The hand-cranked mechanical pocket calculator, with its stepped drum, sliders and counter rings
• Analytical Engine - Charles Babbage's mechanical general-purpose computer, with its Mill, its Store and its punched-card programs
• Apollo Guidance Computer - The computer that flew Apollo to the Moon, running its real flight software with the DSKY keypad and display
• Colossus - The code-breaking machine at Bletchley Park that broke the German Lorenz cipher, the first programmable electronic digital computer
• Zuse Z3 - Konrad Zuse's relay computer, the first programmable, fully automatic digital machine, working in binary floating point
• Harwell Dekatron Computer (WITCH) - A decimal computer whose memory is a wall of glowing dekatron tubes, programmed from paper tape
• ANITA - The first all-electronic desktop calculator, with its full keyboard and Nixie tube display

All of the machines are equipped with a common interface, which lets a keyboard or controller for the device be attached, and the same debugger be used whatever the format of the memory, the registers (or the mechanical positions that serve as registers) or the machine's instructions.

Contents

The sections of emulators.org, and the pages in each.

Technologies

• WASM - Emulator code
• JavaScript - Emulator code, search features
• Node.js - Backend

Articles

• A pure JavaScript CPU emulator - A working emulator for a tiny CPU in plain JavaScript, a loop and a switch

More games

• Rocks Off! - A tile-based puzzle game with eight worlds and a level editor
• Key Hunt - The biggest key hunt in the world, an online multiplayer game
• Asteroids - A multiplayer Asteroids arena in the browser
• Buttermilk Forever - A pixel-art arena brawler for your phone
• Tetrisk - Two pieces in two wells at once, playable in the browser
• Sprites.org - Browser editors for game graphics, sound and data
• Gamehoster - Realtime multiplayer rooms, hosted on your own server