This is pretty sad. Seeing this a couple of years ago would be mind blowing. An impressive technical feat by someone with grit and resilience to painstakingly build this from scratch.
I had the exact same thought. I vibecoded a MOS6502 emulator a few months back in Rust. My Rust skill is weak, and I learned absolutely nothing about the 6502 or CPU design. Had I done it manually, there's also no way to prove I created it without LLM help making the whole exercise less appealing overall.
>My Rust skill is weak, and I learned absolutely nothing about the 6502 or CPU design.
But you could have if you had have chosen to. Did you ask the AI what the slow parts were, and why?
Why did you want to emulate a 6502 in the first place? If you just wanted to run some 6502 code then that's ok, you didn't really need to know much about the 6502. If you wanted to know how much better it could be if it had an single register that was the high byte of zero page address accesses then you probably would have to be engaged enough to find out, and the AI would help you answer questions. You could try rearranging the lookup table at the bottom of the die to see if you could make your own instruction set that would perform better overall. AI would help with that too, but to direct it to do so you would have to be learning something.
Ok, I did learn a little bit about the 6502. I would have learned far more by implementing the emulator itself.
My actual goal was to understand if it was possible to build the equivalent of a rudimentary CPU inside of a living cell. At a high level, the 6502 shows me that most of the circuitry of the chip is not concerned with arithmetic, but rather orchestration and moving data.
Same problem actually exists when trying to map this concept to a cell... the lack of wiring makes this more difficult.
Yeah, the microcode ops are a pretty good demostration on how it is all just a sequence of connect-this-to-that with a bus for the this and fixed functions on all of the that.
guiambros · · focus · HN ↗
Today? Meh.
LarsDu88 · · focus · HN ↗
Lerc · · focus · HN ↗
But you could have if you had have chosen to. Did you ask the AI what the slow parts were, and why?
Why did you want to emulate a 6502 in the first place? If you just wanted to run some 6502 code then that's ok, you didn't really need to know much about the 6502. If you wanted to know how much better it could be if it had an single register that was the high byte of zero page address accesses then you probably would have to be engaged enough to find out, and the AI would help you answer questions. You could try rearranging the lookup table at the bottom of the die to see if you could make your own instruction set that would perform better overall. AI would help with that too, but to direct it to do so you would have to be learning something.
LarsDu88 · · focus · HN ↗
My actual goal was to understand if it was possible to build the equivalent of a rudimentary CPU inside of a living cell. At a high level, the 6502 shows me that most of the circuitry of the chip is not concerned with arithmetic, but rather orchestration and moving data.
Same problem actually exists when trying to map this concept to a cell... the lack of wiring makes this more difficult.
Lerc · · focus · HN ↗