Ask HN: Can someone help me find HN post about 00s console emulation?
A Hacker News user is searching for a May blog post about reverse-engineering and emulating several obscure children's game consoles from the same company. The post detailed cheap hardware (stripped ARM, a 6502 variant), a VM inside the CPU, and a unique buffer feature for swapping drawing elements between cartridges.
Background
- The post refers to a blog about reverse-engineering VTech (or similar) children's educational consoles from the 2000s — cheap toy systems (V.Smile, V.Flash, etc.) that ran games like Barbie and drawing apps. These consoles used stripped-down ARM CPUs or 6502 chips running a VM layer that emulated a proprietary processor the company originally planned to build.