Anatomy of a Retro BIOS
Designing firmware for emulated retro computers—reset vectors, service calls, UART I/O, toolchains, and the boot theatre that makes it feel real.
ARTICLES // TECHNICAL NOTES
40 ENTRIES
// WRITING
Articles
Writeups, deep dives, and devlogs — antennas and packet radio at one end, emulators and language design at the other.
View:
Deep Dive: Audio Bus Architecture
Centralizing modem, line, backend, and peripheral audio in a single bus system, after a demo where the volume knob only worked on half the sounds.
Deep Dive: Building a Canada Goose Simulator
A deadpan text adventure about mild chaos, built on a time budget: 79 tests, procedural honk audio, and a migration ending instead of a game over screen.
Deep Dive: Audio Sonification for Code Visualization
Mapping code history onto sixteen oscillators: why a harmonic series turned to mud, how gain has to follow perception, and the double-ramp bug behind the pulsing.
Deep Dive: Custom Canvas Charts for 30fps Animation
Chart.js redraws the full scene on every update, which is right for a dashboard and wrong for playback. Replacing it with a Canvas 2D renderer.
Deep Dive: Balancing a Goose Game
The iteration that turned a text adventure into something playable: balance tuning, achievement scaffolding, and the 1081-line manual that made it legible.
Assemblers, Memory Maps, and Madness
Building cross-assemblers for retro CPUs in Rust, migrating to Pest parsers, and discovering why load addresses matter more than you think.
Deep Dive: Simulating DATAPAC, Canada's Forgotten Internet
Rebuilding the DATAPAC PAD experience in code: the command loop, X.25 NUAs, and five period-authentic hosts behind a 300-baud prompt.
Deep Dive: Lazy Loading 42 Backends with Dynamic Imports
Shrinking the emulator's main bundle from 1.1MB to 104KB by lazy-loading backends, and hiding the fetch inside the dial tone.
Deep Dive: Worker Heartbeats and Job Recovery
JetStream redelivered the message and the work was still lost. Moving job ownership out of the queue and into the database.
Inside Five CPU Emulators
Five classic CPU cores in Rust, compiled to WebAssembly: 8008, 8080, 8088, Z80, and 6502, and the edge cases that keep emulation honest.
Deep Dive: The Microservices Migration
A BBS emulator that outgrew localStorage: gRPC services, NATS messaging, a gateway, and the question of whether any of it was necessary.
Server-Backed Backends and Peripherals Go Physical
Migrating backends to server APIs with NATS pub/sub, adding microservices, and building the peripheral slot system alongside the Canada Goose game.
Identity, SEO, and a Lot of Polish
Identity got real: guest sessions, passkeys, and a server‑backed auth surface, plus gopher content routing, Z‑Machine version wiring, and a formatting sweep.
Building a Code Evolution Analyzer in a Weekend
A quick script turned into two days of yak-shaving through collection speed, chart performance, and an audio bug that took hours to find and one line to fix.
Deep Dive: Passkey Authentication for a Retro BBS
Passkeys in a 300‑baud world: the smallest WebAuthn flow, the server state it requires, and how I kept it in tune with emulator.ca's identity model.
CC-40 Completion and IVR Launch
Shipping the TI CC-40 backend with authentic CALL commands and audio, plus a full IVR phone tree system.
Storage Peripherals and Audio Realism
Floppy, hard drive, and cassette peripherals with Kansas City Standard encoding, plus a peripheral audio bus that makes the machine feel physical.