I have a soft spot for fictional computers, having implemented compilers, bytecode interpreters, and even program synthesis for various made-up computer architectures.

This post is yet another dive into VM implementation, looking at a particularly fascinating ecosystem from Hundred Rabbits:

The Uxn CPU is a simple, 256-instruction stack machine
Varavara defines a set of peripherals that turn that CPU into an actual computer (display, keyboard, mouse, etc)

Unlike many fictional computers, the Uxn + Varvara ecosystem is sophisticated enough for actual use, and there are dozens of different ROMs – everything from text editors to drawing programs to synthesizers.

The Hundred Rabbits devlog motivates this design with far more eloquence than I could offer; I'd encourage you to browse their sprawling wiki of documentation, blog posts, and development notes.

My implementation is called Raven.