Z80 Sans – a disassembler in a font (2024) (github.com)

This made me smile. What an astonishing combination. The oddball application of a font as a disassembler works like a wonderful practical joke to me. Merging parsing, processing and rendering into a single step feels mad genius.

Man... I'm lucky if the fonts I'm using even have tabular figures as alternates. This is on a whole other level.

Not too surprising given that a font maps bytes into glyphs, and an instruction set maps them to instructions. I suspect a 6502 or 8051 version would be much simpler.

I guess it would be cheating, but he actually could have just written it in Rust, since OpenType can execute web assembly. People have abused that to embed things like Tetris and even an LLM inside of fonts.

What he did was more impressive in a way.

You can do a lot of crazy things with fonts. Just off the top of my head:

Tetris Font - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40737294

A font which is also an LLM - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40766791

And in the same vein:

Tetris in a PDF - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42645218

Doom in a PDF - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42678754

Ha ha this is the best thing I have seen today in hacker news!

So clever and funny

I thought my Z80 project (https://github.com/billforsternz/retro-sargon) was close to the whimsical end of the practical to just for fun spectrum but this takes things to a whole new level, kudos.

i had gpt-5.4 write a 6502 font version of this font [1] in between working on other things. super fun and learned a lot by watching it do its thing.

[1] https://github.com/jflam/6502-sans