mxmgorin.dev | Web TUI

mxmgorin.devA terminal-style personal site by Maxim Gorin. This page needs JavaScript for the interactive UI; the blog posts are readable directly:

A Language With No Syntax: A Brainfuck Compiler in C# — Brainfuck has no syntax worth parsing, which makes it the perfect language to build a compiler for. csbf is a full C# toolchain: an optimizing IR, a reversible VM with time-travel debugging, a Go transpiler, an IL JIT, and a Blazor playground that runs most of it in the browser.

Every Megabyte Counts: A Browser on a 1 GB Handheld — A modern browser on a handheld with no dedicated VRAM and weak in-order cores. What actually moved the needle — deleting allocations, tuning Servo's prefs, and shipping three per-core binaries to dodge a SIGILL — and, just as important, what I chose not to do.

A browser you drive with a gamepad — A web browser assumes a mouse and a keyboard — a retro handheld has neither. How retsurf drives a full browser from a gamepad: intents not buttons, a virtual cursor, link hints with a gamepad alphabet, an on-screen keyboard, and in-app rebinding.

Embedding Servo in SDL2 — one GPU, too many bugs — Servo renders the web, SDL2 owns the window on bare hardware, egui draws the UI — and getting all three to share one GPU with no compositor and an old driver was a string of crashes. The unabridged tour, in the order they happened.

Building a Rust web browser for retro handhelds — Retro handhelds have Wi-Fi, a GPU, and a gigabyte of RAM — but no usable web browser. Why that gap exists, and how I'm closing it with retsurf, built on Servo, SDL2, and egui.

How I Test a CHIP-8 Emulator (When There's No "Correct") — CHIP-8 has no single correct output, so here's how I test ch8go anyway — variant-aware ROM automation and byte-exact golden-file comparison.

How I Structured My CHIP-8 Emulator (and Why) — After a Game Boy emulator taught me how platform code leaks into the core, I built ch8go around one rule: the core shouldn't know its frontend. A tour of its Guest / Host / App structure.

What CHIP-8 actually is (before you emulate it) — The mental model I built before writing ch8go — what CHIP-8 really is, the variants that complicate it, and the quirks that bite every emulator author.

All posts →

mxmgorin.dev