[pushfoo]

TL;DR: Octo[1] and OctoJam were cozy little highlights despite the grimness of the pandemic years.

Octo[1] targets variants of CHIP-8, an ancient virtual console. The language is so different from daily work that even its annoyances were refreshing. Yes, that includes having to overwrite parts of instructions to get desired behavior.

The maintainer has moved on[2] to working on Decker[3], but I'm still grateful for his dedication. He underestimates his contributions to encouraging a new generation of emulator developers. I haven't had time to do a deep dive into emulation beyond CHIP-8, but I've enjoyed making:

* A little Mastermind-like game (https://pushfoo.itch.io/safecracker)

* A terminal-like text library (https://pushfoo.itch.io/termlib-demo)

Others have done far better. Timendus even wrote his own linker toolkit to build a multi-tasking operating system[4]. If you're interested, there have been some rumblings of an October event of some sort now and then on the EmuDev Discord server to fill the gap left by OctoJam's end.

[1]: https://github.com/JohnEarnest/Octo

[2]: https://beyondloom.com/blog/octojam.html

[3]: https://github.com/JohnEarnest/Decker

[4]: https://timendus.itch.io/chipception-os