Someone suggested that this qualified for Hacker News so I thought I'd send it this way.
Initially wanting to show kids the old BBC Micro game called Thrust in their language of choice (Scratch) I went on a rather insane journey that resulted in putting together a full BBC Micro emulator (that even emulates the disk drive and sound chip at a hardware level) entirely programmed in the children's block-based computer language, Scratch! There's even a debugger with breakpoints, watches, data bps, etc, tucked away in there.
Hopefully it'll have educational value, allowing children to program in BBC BASIC or 6502 assembly from within Scratch. There's certainly a high level of irony in emulating the computer I learned programming on in a language designed to teach children to learn programming!
What's really pleasing is that I'm starting to see programs written by Scratchers appearing in the Scratch forum I set up for the project!
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[ 6.5 ms ] story [ 28.2 ms ] threadInitially wanting to show kids the old BBC Micro game called Thrust in their language of choice (Scratch) I went on a rather insane journey that resulted in putting together a full BBC Micro emulator (that even emulates the disk drive and sound chip at a hardware level) entirely programmed in the children's block-based computer language, Scratch! There's even a debugger with breakpoints, watches, data bps, etc, tucked away in there.
Hopefully it'll have educational value, allowing children to program in BBC BASIC or 6502 assembly from within Scratch. There's certainly a high level of irony in emulating the computer I learned programming on in a language designed to teach children to learn programming!
What's really pleasing is that I'm starting to see programs written by Scratchers appearing in the Scratch forum I set up for the project!