Just a heads up, this project is still moving forward, slowly, my computer game consulting company IARItech.com has been busier than ever, taking up nearly all my time, along with the search for a new boat. That said, I have been making some progress, mostly on the emulator and debugger.

I started working on a basic system monitor in Ember assembly, while also improving the assembler and debugger functionality as I go, then I got caught up with separating the integrated emulator and debugger into separate applications. Previously they were the same app, with the debugger being the emulator, and a separate window showing the output of the virtual machine.

I have now separated the two and I’m working on a socket-based network debugging protocol. The advantage will be that the emulator can run on a separate machine from the debugger. There are two scenarios that come into play here, one is running the emulator on a Steam Deck or other portable system, and the other is debugging Ember code directly on FPGA hardware, we’ll need a debugger that can connect to an FPGA fabric debugging harness, or possibly a debugger/monitor running as system software on the actual hardware.