Hacker News

mad
Gate-level emulation of an Intel 4004 in 4004 bytes of C nicholas.carlini.com

kazinator5 hours ago

A cool fact about the 4004 is that the Busicom calculator project it was used in actually used the 4004 to interpret a more capable virtual machine, in whose machine code the calculator app was actually written. Intel did not quite build a general-purpose processor in whose instruction set the application was written directly.

rep_lodsb3 hours ago

I hate to be this critical, but this is not emulating the actual 4004.

It's a logic circuit simulator that takes in a compressed representation of something and runs it, with an I/O mechanism that emulates the Busicom calculator hardware (keyboard and printer).

Still impressive for the size of the code, but the "CPU" is nothing like a 4004, or any real microprocessor.

dmitrygr12 hours ago

This is beautiful.

hyperhello6 hours ago

This is beyond spaghetti code.

hn-front (c) 2024 voximity
source