Blinkenlights

your pc binary emulating visualizer

Here's a first principles tutorial. You can program your emulator by doing the same thing that folks did back in the 1970's programming the Altair 8800: entering the raw octal instructions. The only difference is we're using printf instead of those flip switches. Here's a simple program to get started:

printf '\100\353\375' >prog.bin
blinkenlights -r prog.bin

You should then see your program appear in a terminal interface that looks like the following:

You can then press the s key to step through your program. Be sure to make the terminal font size as small as possible, and to maximize the terminal window, so that you see all the panels. It’s also a good idea to enable SSH compression when accessing Linux via the net, since it’ll increase your framerate.

Assembling Real Mode Code

Here’s how you can build programs using the GNU Assembler and Linker.

echo '	.code16
	.globl	_start
_start:	dec	%ax
	jmp	_start
' | as -o prog.o
ld -static --oformat=binary prog.o -o prog.bin
blinkenlights -r prog.bin