Emulators, assemblers, and asset tooling for vintage machines
Code Like It's 198x is one of several sibling projects under the 198x umbrella. They share an origin and a love of these machines — but each has its own mission, roadmap, and brand. None is "the tool behind" another; they're peers that happen to grow up together.
If you've come here from the curriculum, this is what powers the work behind the scenes — and where to go if you want to use the tools directly, or help build them.
Cycle-accurate emulation
Emulators for vintage machines, written in Rust — cross-platform, scriptable, and MCP-driven. The accuracy work that lets a Pattern Library routine claim "this works on real hardware" and mean it.
Explore Emu198xModern assemblers & disassemblers
Single-binary, cross-platform assemblers and disassemblers for the family’s target CPUs — 6502, Z80, 68000 — built on a shared, declarative ISA spec. No dead operating system required to run them.
Explore Asm198xAsset cataloguing
Inventory, verify, and dedup retro binary collections — ROMs, OS disks, TOSEC sets, test suites. Knows what you have, what’s verified against the DATs, and what’s missing.
Explore Cat198xA workbench for vintage code
A dev workbench for writing vintage code, sitting over Emu198x and Asm198x with agent-native parity. The repo home is established; the build is deferred until the assembler matures.
In design — not yet publicBuild tools & media mastering
The build pipeline beyond the assembler — converts graphics and audio to native formats, packs data, and masters the tape and disk images a real machine can load.
Explore Build198xA player for vintage media
Plays and previews retro media — SID and AY tunes, IFF and SCR images, Amiga animations — by driving Emu198x’s chip cores, without booting a whole machine. Decided as a sibling; the build is not yet started.
In design — not yet publicAll of it is open source, built in the open, with a lot of help from large language models — declared plainly, as everything here is.