Hi I'm Alex. I'm doing research on classic gaming systems so that we can build perfect emulations of hardware that otherwise won't last forever.
I have a lot more content on my other site, but I wanted to try out neocities :) If you like what you see here and want to link to me, send me a message so I can link back to you. Contact me
To make it easier to follow people on neocities, I've created a little widget or "bookmarklet". You can drag this link to your bookmarks bar, and click it whenever you want to follow a neocities page. Visit Neocities Profile (bookmark me!)
Now if you're ever on a neocities page, like this one, you can click that bookmark and it will navigate you to the corresponding profile page. This makes it easier to follow pages you find interesting. Note that it only works on pages of the form sitename.neocities.org. For sites that use their own domain, there isn't a good way to find the profile page (as far as I know).
If you find this interesting, you can follow my neocities page. I also post to all my socials when a new post is available, so you can follow me on one of these,, or subscribe to the rss feed for my main site.
To give you an idea of what you can find on my main site, here are a few key projects I'm working on:
I create emulators for popular old systems. A lot of these old systems were really cleverly designed, being both powerful for the era but also very fun to program. There is a reason people still create homebrew for these consoles. But the classic hardware won't last forever. But information can, so by creating digital versions of these consoles they can have an extended lifetime.
While putting together the emulators, I also write about how they work. These could be interesting if you want to know how old consoles worked, or want to try to write homebrew games yourself. These explanations are available on my site, and sometimes also on my youtube channel. Some links:
Its like the matrix but for electronic circuits instead of people. It creates a virtual environment for real chips, so that we can study how they work in detail. The chips are online, so if you've ever wanted to try programming a 6502 (like the original Apple ][ or an NES), now you can: 6502 chiplab. More chips coming soon.
Building very accurate emulators requires a really deep understanding of the things you are emulating. A lot of old consoles have old quirks that still arent understood. I built the chiplab for myself and anyone else that wants to better understand.
Thanks to the chiplab we can see exactly how the original hardware would respond when running programs. I have open source modelling projects for each of the chips in the chiplab. The goal is to build a perfect digital version of the original hardware. These projects are meant to be as accurate as possible, without worrying about speed.
The chip models are compared against the real chips by running programs against both, and making sure they match up. Unit tests are created automatically from programs submitted to the Chiplab. Here's the model for the 6502. If you'd like to help, I'd really appreciate it. 6502 model on Github.