Emulation 101: Reconstructing the Matrix

Note: Meet & greet begins around 5:15 with the presentation around 6 PM.

Sponsored by Applied Data Consultants

Abandonware is everywhere. Whether it be a disgruntled programmer who no longer wants to support a project to huge corporations discontinuing a product; eventually things are saved to a floppy disk and forgotten. Time goes by, hardware and software changes, and legacy features our abandonware depended on is eventually phased out.

We can freeze time and have our abandonware run in an immutable, unadaptable, ageless, environment. Or we can build an emulator supporting the instructions required to make it execute while taking advantage of a more efficient environment. For example: Sony implemented a PS1 emulator in the PS3. We can plug our abandonware back into the matrix.

We'll explore Chip8, an interpreted gaming language invented for do-it-yourself computer systems in the late 1970s and early 1980s. We'll look at how to emulate the hardware in which Chip8 depended on and how to parse Chip8 instructions from their binary files. Maybe even start a Pong league.

Presented by Ben Anderson
Ben has been working in the Chippewa Valley area over the past five years as an ETL Developer, Software Engineer, and Web Developer. There's nothing more thrilling for him than seeing thousands of people using applications he helped develop. With his free time, when he's not hacking away with assembly, he enjoys the solitude of working in a small motorcycle restoration shop with his grease monkey friends and cross-country cycling. You can follow him on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/BJS_Anderson.