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Ask HN: Can someone help me find HN post about 00s console emulation?
3 points by NooneAtAll3 3 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 5 comments
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



That's "Preserving Pixter" by Dmitry Grinberg. The console is the Fisher-Price Pixter.

HN thread from May: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48091812 The post itself: https://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=37.+Pixter


thank you!

what an unfortunate name, as my mind simply glanced over "fisher price" thinking it was some stock market or economy post

and while I could remember something about "saving" the console and games, I don't think I would've come up with "preserve" synonym to put into the search

thank you a lot!

----

how did you find it? did you simply remember the post/blog or did you come up with a good search keyword?


Searched, didn't remember it. Literally just put in "kids console emulator Barbie drawing stamps cartridge 6502 VM" and it was the second result. The 6502-under-a-VM and save-a-drawing-across-carts details are weird enough to find on their own. Names are useless for this, you either have them or you don't, but the specific behavior almost nothing else matches. Next time just throw all the oddly specific bits into one search even if they don't go together. I found out thay the weirder the detail, the better it works.


> Literally just put in "kids console emulator Barbie drawing stamps cartridge 6502 VM" and it was the second result.

I wish my search looked that way :(

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=kids+console+emulator+Barbie+drawi...


Oh damn, I guess it's an engine thing? Same search on Google: https://www.google.com/search?q=kids+console+emulator+Barbie...




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