Explorable, hands-on explanations of how classic game consoles — and the home computers beside them — actually worked. Not spec sheets: every machine is a set of playable courses you can hear, drag and toggle, built as plain, dependency-free web pages — and every course ends inside the emulator that keeps the machine alive. More machines land over time.
The home computer that started it all: the MOS 6502, a memory map wired straight to the screen through soft switches, hi-res and lo-res graphics, speaker-clicked sound, Applesoft BASIC and hand-written 6502 assembly.
The Mega Drive: two CPUs — a Motorola 68000 and a Z80 sidekick — the VDP's two scrolling planes and sprite engine, the snarling Yamaha YM2612 FM synth beside the SN76489 PSG, and ROM cartridges with lock-on tricks.
The 16-bit machine: a 65816 with banked memory and DMA tricks, the two-chip PPU with Mode 7, Sony's eight-voice S-DSP, and cartridges that smuggled whole co-processors past the CPU.
The little purple box: the PowerPC Gekko with paired singles, the Flipper GPU and its TEV pipeline, a programmable 16-bit audio DSP, and the deliberately off-spec 8 cm miniDVD drive.
The collection grows one machine at a time — fundamentals from zero, the real silicon, and how emulators bring it back.
Each machine is split into subsystems — CPU, graphics, audio, storage — and each subsystem is a self-contained course in three parts: Part I teaches the field's fundamentals from absolute zero, Part II tears down that machine's take on it, and Part III shows how an emulator reproduces it. Every module ships interactive labs; everything is drawn and synthesised live in your browser. No build steps, no frameworks, no tracking, and no copyrighted game assets — ever.