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Products that do what WIP NandToTetris Emulator in pure C – logic gates to ALU to CPU to PC does
* OPEN TO CONTRIBUTIONS * NandToTetris is a course which has you build a full computer from: Logic gates -> Chips -> RAM -> CPU -> Computer -> Assembler -> Compiler -> OS -> Tetris All this is done via software defined hardware emulation. I'm building an emulator for this entire stack in C. How is my approach different to other projects that build emulators? - No external dependencies (so far) - Start with a single software defined NAND gate in C - EVERYTHING is built from this base chip - Don't use certain programming utilities: boolean logic operators, bitwise logic operators etc Instead…
- 1IM
I am proud to present my solo hobby project NAND. This year-long undertaking follows the completed Nand to Tetris course, but ported to the web with its own runtime, user interface, and IDE. Using the "Load example program" selector, you can try out some programs I wrote on NAND's emulated hardware such as 2048, a genetic algorithm, and a manual stack overflow to corrupt the screen. Check out NAND at https://nand.arhan.sh Additionally, I've authored an extensive writeup about the project. Read about it on the GitHub repository's readme.
2024 · github.com
- 2IW
2021 · github.com
- 3WB
Hi! me and my friends together built an 8 bit CPU implemented in Logisim purely from scratch. The control unit of this system does not implement the generic microcode ROM or any kind of RAM. This was made purely from discrete logic gates and coded the system to run different programs. key features: Custom 16-instruction Harvard ISA, 8-bit fixed format, 4 general purpose registers Hardwired control unit built entirely from AND/OR gate logic matrix Dual-phase clocking to eliminate race conditions Bootstrap Control Unit that cold-boots via ROM-to-RAM transfer Early-exit conditional…
Jun 2026 · github.com
- 4OS
Hi HN, I built a specialized inference engine for running 4-bit Gemma 4 26B-A4B-IT on any M-series Mac using about 2 GB of RAM. It is called TurboFieldfare and is written in Swift and Metal. I have always adored on-device AI. It feels like magic that you can run a powerful NN on your Mac or iPhone. So I wanted to push the limits a bit and run a model whose weights don’t fit in memory. The model’s 4-bit quantized weights occupy roughly 14 GB, which makes running it with conventional inference tools almost impossible on an 8 GB or even 16 GB Mac once the OS, applications, and KV cache are…
Jul 2026 · github.com
- 5AN
The core question: how did HP's scientific calculators actually work at the gate level? That rabbit hole led to building one from scratch. The architectural decision everything else follows from: a decimal calculator should store numbers as BCD — one decimal digit per 4-bit nibble. A standard byte-oriented CPU (Z80, 6502) fights that layout constantly. So I designed a small custom CPU in Verilog where 4 bits is the natural data width and memory is nibble addressable. What the project covers: - Custom CPU: Harvard architecture, 12-bit ISA, 8-state execution FSM, hardware stack guard with a…
May 2026 · github.com
- 6H1
This is a 16bit CPU+Minicomputer from pure 74 series logic. It has user/kernel modes, virtual memory, prioritized IRQ's and DMA. It has a full C compiler and a unix-like OS. It's still in development.
2023 · sol-1.org
- 7IM
I built ChipBuilder to make computer architecture more approachable through interactive puzzles. You start with basic logic gates like AND, OR, and NOT, then gradually combine them into adders, multiplexers, memory, an ALU, and eventually a complete CPU. Once you've built the hardware, you can write assembly programs that run on the processor you created. The game is inspired by courses like Nand2Tetris, but everything runs directly in the browser with a visual circuit editor, simulations, and progressively harder challenges.
Jul 2026 · select.supply
- 8TI
2019 · djblue.github.io
- 9IS
First Release is Here! I'm excited to announce the first release of i486SX_soft_FPU — a software FPU emulator for the classic Intel 486SX CPU, running on NetBSD 10! This project brings floating-point support back to life for 486SX machines, even though modern NetBSD versions no longer natively support processors without a hardware FPU. If you're into retrocomputing, operating system hacking, or just love old-school hardware, check it out! Project page: https://github.com/mezantrop/i486SX_soft_FPU Contributions, feedback, and testing are all very welcome! Let's keep these…
2025 · github.com
- 10TB
OFRAK Tetris is a project I started at work about two weeks ago. It's a web-based game that works on desktop and mobile. I made it for my company to bring to events like DEF CON, and to promote our binary analysis and patching framework called OFRAK. In the game, 32-bit, little-endian ARM assembly instructions fall, and you can modify the operands before executing them on a CPU emulator. There are two segments mapped – one for instructions, and one for data (though both have read, write, and execute permissions). Your score is a four byte signed integer stored at the virtual address pointed…
2023 · ofrak.com
- 11CC
Hi! I've been working on the flipjump project, a programming language with 1 opcode: flip (invert) a bit, then jump (unconditionally). So a bit-flip followed by more bit-flips. It's effectively a bunch of NOT gates. This language, as poor as it sounds, is RICH. Today I completed my compiler from C to FlipJump. It takes C files, and compiles them into flipjump. I finished testing it all today, and it works! My key interest in this project is to stretch what we know of computing and to prove that anything can be done even with minimal power. I appreciate you reading my announcement, and be…
2025 · github.com
- 12IM
2013 · github.com
- 13MP
I have been working on this game somewhat sparsely for the past three years or so. However, it is still in a very early stage, and there is a lot of work to do. One of my friends encouraged me to post about it here, since he felt people might find interesting how I don’t use any libraries for it. The game can be played on a browser by virtue of WebAssembly. There are native ports using either MiniFB or SDL2, but you have to build those yourself. I decided to write the game in C because I feel like it is a simple language that a lot of people can understand well enough, and I didn’t think I…
2023 · zamfofex.neocities.org
- 14AD
To try it out, simply build the project yourself from source, or use attached bootable ISO image of the system (in Releases on Github) and run it in QEMU. https://blog.vxn.dev/rou2exos-rusted-edition
2025 · github.com
- 15D3
I replicated David Ng's RYS method (https://dnhkng.github.io/posts/rys/) on consumer AMD GPUs (RX 7900 XT + RX 6950 XT) and found something I didn't expect. Transformers appear to have discrete "reasoning circuits" — contiguous blocks of 3-4 layers that act as indivisible cognitive units. Duplicate the right block and the model runs its reasoning pipeline twice. No weights change. No training. The model just thinks longer. The results on standard benchmarks (lm-evaluation-harness, n=50): Devstral-24B, layers 12-14 duplicated once: - BBH Logical Deduction: 0.22 → 0.76…
Mar 2026 · github.com
- 16GP
I've been exploring new ways of testing Ghidra processor modules. In this repo, I was able to emulate NES ROMs in Ghidra to test its 6502 specification, which resulted in finding and fixing some bugs. Context: Ghidra is used for reverse engineering binary executables, complementing the usual disassembly view with function decompilation. Each supported architecture has a SLEIGH specification, which provides semantics for parsing and emulating instructions, not unlike the dispatch handlers you would find in interpreters written for console emulators. Emulator devs have long had extensive test…
2023 · github.com
- 17IB
A while back I wrote a CHIP-8 emulator (which is considered the Hello, World! of emulators and is more accurately a virtual machine since historically CHIP-8 was an interpreted language running on top of the COSMAC VIP to make game programming easier). But a few months ago I got really interested in embedded software, so decided it would be neat to port my emulator to a STM32 MCU and design a console around it as a learning experience, since CHIP-8 never existed as a physical system. I didn't know much about embedded software when I began, and even less about electronics, but I managed to…
2022 · github.com
- 18IB
We wanted to do something very challenging to prove to ourselves that we can do anything we put our mind to. The reasoning for why we chose to build a toy TPU specifically is fairly simple: - Building a chip for ML workloads seemed cool - There was no well-documented open source repo for an ML accelerator that performed both inference and training None of us have real professional experience in hardware design, which, in a way, made the TPU even more appealing since we weren't able to estimate exactly how difficult it would be. As we worked on the initial stages of this project, we…
2025 · tinytpu.com
- 19AH
Long-simmering side project that is finally ready to see the light. HAMTs are a cool persistent data structure and implementing one has been a lot of fun. Beyond the code, there is likely some value in the extensive and largely complete implementation docs; basic benchmarks are linked in the README, too. Kind of aiming to be "the libavl for HAMTs". That is obviously a high and aspirational bar but a distinct possibility if it stirs up a little interest and/or contribution. Anyways, it's time for this to go out, collect feedback and maybe even some use outside of toy projects. Let me…
2023 · github.com
- 20MM
This project contains no code from Linux, BSD, Minix, or any other OS. Everything up until this point is written entirely from scratch, including a pure microkernel (that only implements multiprocessor priority scheduling, memory management, and interprocess communication), a work-in-progress implementation of the standard C library, and a variety of servers that provide drivers and other essential OS functionality. At the time of writing this post, the servers provide drivers for the keyboard, NVMe SSDs (that works on real hardware), a Unix-like virtual file system (with a single root…
2024 · github.com
- 21IM
Inspired by games like Turing Complete/Virtual Circuit Board/Logic World, I tried to make a mix of aseprite and wiredworld/wired-logic, the idea being the user can build a digital circuit using a "fullstack" pixelart creation workflow. The circuit is just an image. The primitives are (i) connected wires which have undefined, 0 or 1 state during simulation (displayed brighter or darker in function of the state) and (ii) NANDs, which are little pixel triangles. During simulation the user can interact with any wire by clicking on it, toggling its state, which is cool for messing…
2024 · github.com
- 22TP
After being thrust headfirst into FPGA development thanks to the Analogue Pocket, my first from scratch creation was a gate level implementation of the original Tamagotchi toy. The core, running on both the Analogue Pocket and MiSTer platforms, lets users re-experience the very first Tamagotchi from 1996 with accurate emulation, but modern features. The core has savestates (which is much harder to do in hardware vs software emulation), high turbo speeds (1,800x was the max clock speed I've reached so far), and more. Learning more about hardware and FPGAs is something I've wanted to do for…
Oct 2025 · github.com
- 23SS
I built MCP servers for my oscilloscope and SPICE simulator so Claude Code can close the loop between simulation and real hardware.
Apr 2026 · lucasgerads.com
- 24WM
We wrote our inference engine on Rust, it is faster than llama cpp in all of the use cases. Your feedback is very welcomed. Written from scratch with idea that you can add support of any kernel and platform.
2025 · github.com
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