Ask HN: Can someone help me find HN post about 00s console emulation?

3 points

10 hours ago

I'm looking for a blog post I saw here on HN somewhere in May. It was about successful efforts in reverse-engineering, dumping ROM+catridges and emulation of several consoles from the same (toy?) company. I distinctly remember blog post saying that before effort of their team (of 2?) there were no emulators of those machines

IIRC, console was targeted for little kids (there was barbie game and big focus on drawing), one of unique features was being able to save image to the buffer - so that you can switch game cartridges and be able to use different drawing elements/stamps, like getting a car from car game and switch to barbie game to seat her into the car

I think blog post went in a lot of detail about cheapness of the design - ARM core with all optional addons removed, no pull up resistors. One of console versions straight up used 6502. In all cases actual processor was running VM emulating some other processor (which author assumed was some internal hardware games were programmed for before company decided not to build own CPU)

I've just looked through news.ycombinator.com/front but couldn't find it. Also I couldn't come up with any good keywords to use in algolia's hn search

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