I’ve been itching to create some emulated 8-bit hardware for some time - not for an existing system but rather for my dream 8-bit system. However it always felt “too big” as I knew that I’d need tools like assemblers, graphics editors, and basically a whole lot of stuff. Then a couple of months ago I colleague asked me “how did you build that so fast”, something I’d done in the day. I realised that with the help of AI I could now build an 8-bit console and a developer kit for it in a reasonable frame of time and, at the same time, use it as a way to show other developers how you can use AI to accelerate your work.

And thus this now legendary series was born.

I also figured it would be fun, and perhaps helpful to others, to show how to integrate AI into the devkit so it could help us write code and create games.

As I write this we’re about a third of the way through things, and we’ve, in no particular order:

• Created a CPU with a custom instruction set (think 6502 with a RISC twist)
• Built an assembler
• Got a basic IDE up and running with breakpoints
• Pixels on the screen in a linear frame buffer
• Built a syntax and error highlighting editor
• Created a palette editor
• Incorporated an AI coding assistant with MCP tools for interacting with source code and our IDE
• Created a tool for converting images into assembly code
• Wired up gamepads
• Had our AI assistant (with a bit of help from me) create Pong

Next steps are to create a graphics editor and get the sprite and tilemap hardware working.